Posted on 25 Mar 2009
The Board of Investment (BoI) is revising all its conditions and incentives to make them more attractive to different investment projects.
The revision was started last year and is expected to be completed this year, said BOI senior executive investment adviser Hirunya Suchinai.
"The current incentive system has been in place since 2000. Since then, we have been assessing both the strengths and the weakness of our system with an eye to improvement. When revision is complete, we are confident that we will be better able to attract investment," she said.
Currently, the BOI divides activities that are eligible for promotion into seven sections:
Hirunya said the BOI had basically completed the revision but needed further discussion with the private sector and some testing before approval.
The agency's projection of the total value of approved applications, including upstream steel-smelters, is Bt650 billion, she said.
The total value of applications for the first two months of the year was Bt108.7 billion from 141 projects, up from Bt99.6 billion and 214 projects in the same period last year. The higher value was mainly generated from two huge power plants and from biomass-based electricity generation.
"We are likely to see increased investment in several areas, including electronics and eco-products, with better the incentive privileges for six key industries related to high-tech investment, mega-projects and high-tech agricultural materials," she said.
To attract investment during the economic downturn, the BOI has also granted Zone 3-equivalent incentive packages to new investment projects in its promoted industrial estates in Zone 2 (the Laem Chabang Industrial Estate and those in Rayong province) for five more years.
However, she accepted that the Rayong administrative court's ruling on designating several areas in Rayong, including Map Ta Phut, pollution-control zones might confuse investors.
"I believe that the most important thing for investors is a clear direction for business operations here. No investors have asked us about that," she said.
