Thais Mean Business

The book I read to research this post was Thais Mean Business by Robert Cooper which is a very good book which I bought from Amazon. This book is a companion piece to Culture Shock Thailand by the same author with one book looking at doing business and the other looking at Thai culture. This book is rather short and I thought didn't cover the subject in as much detail as I'd have liked. It's still interesting though. Apparently Japanese business people are at an advantage over Westerners in the spoken language is still very different but they use pictograms and the Thai wai is similar to the Japanese bow used at meetings and the handshake has no equivalent in Thailand. Bangkok is very much the centre of Thailand with roads and railways tending to go there and terminate. The Thais call the rest of the country up country because the rest of the country tends to be very rural. If you are a Westerner starting a branch of your business in Thailand you will hire a comprador who will iron out any cultural or business issues and knows all about how these relate to Thai culture. Something I did read somewhere else is a lot of Thai businesses borrowed a lot of money years ago when there was a boom and many are having trouble paying it back. Also apparently most computer hard drives are made in Thailand, so much so that when they had severe flooding it had quite an adverse effect on the prices of these. A tradition in Thailand is if you are doing business with someone, you will have to pay a third party what we would regard as a bribe but Thais regard as normal, to smooth out any business problems. Often Japanese business people understand this better than Westerners, with them coming from a similar culture. Something I read elsewhere is the Yakuza will often have offices in the big cities of Japan and they are regarded as an essential element in keeping crime among the general public down.