A Business Trip to Thailand
Hello I’m Maiyu!
I have recently graduated from the university in Finland and I am now working part-time as an assistant in Relationship Development Office (Department) in HENNGE. Last spring, I participated in 5-days internship program and after that I got an official offer to work at HDE. Because I already graduated, I wanted to start working as a part-timer before joining fully in April.
I think in most of companies it’s unusual to take new graduates to business trip but luckily, I got this special opportunity to go to business trip with sales members. In this post I will tell about my first business trip to Bangkok, Thailand, which I participated as an intern (unpaid but free trip). I had never been to Bangkok so everything was new to me, like culture, food and traffic.
So, first day of the trip: 5:30am I received a mail by airline regarding that my flight to Bangkok will be 3.5h late. I had already bought Narita Express tickets so I decided to go to Narita as I had planned originally. Which meant that I needed to spent about 5 hours in Narita…
Original plan was to meet one of sales members, Tsuji-san at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok but due to flight delay, plans changed and I had to find my way to the Sukhumvit station from airport. Fortunately, I got good and specific instructions so it wasn’t so difficult. Finally, I get to the Sukhumvit station and from there Tsuji-san guided me to the accommodation. My hotel room was really spacious and nice so I was able to sleep well after the long day.
Day 2: I attended an event which was held by HENNGE Thai members Sai-san (Global Business Development), Foam-san (Business Transformation section in Cloud Sales) and Tangerine Co. one of our Thai partner companies.
The main topic was workplace transformation and how it effects on employees productivity. Sai-san introduced our company as an example of workplace transformation. For example, free-address seats, remote working and efficient use of technology. She also introduced new IoT & Cloud-based technology solution of HENNGE which purpose is to improve the efficiency of using meeting rooms and solve current problems regarding meeting rooms. Purpose of this event was to understand how Thai companies think about this issue and if it’s relevant. So everything except presentation slides were in Thai.
In the afternoon, I visited the local partner with HENNGE’s sales members. It was interesting for me to hear about situation in Thailand and differences between other Asian countries, for example, use of different communication tools: in Thailand LINE is most popular even in business use but in some other Asian countries WhatsApp is more popular. I also learned that at the moment, security consciousness seems to be quite low in Thailand.
In the evening, we had a great Thai dinner with all members. I hadn’t eaten Thai food so much before so it was really nice to get a chance to eat many different Thai foods. And everything tasted so good! My favorite was crab curry, in Thai; Poo paht pong karee. I also liked the coconut ice cream with a lots of unique toppings like jackfruit, sticky rice, green noodles, peanuts, nata de coco…
Day 3: We had meetings all day and we also had a dinner with partners. Partner companies that we visited are all Thai branches of well-known big Japanese companies. Due to that there is a lot of things we talked but I can not write much about meetings.
As you may know, we changed our company name on February 1st so main purpose was to explain partners about our change to HENNGE. We also introduced new contact person in international sales.
One thing that I was surprised was the air quality of Bangkok. I had heard about the bad situation before the trip but I couldn’t really imagine before spending a day in Bangkok. Actually it’s not something you could see but you will feel it in your throat if you don’t use a mask for couple of hours.
After the dinner we went to see night market which was very lively and interesting. The area was called Patpong and it looked so different in the night compared to from what it looked on day time.
Last day, we had one meeting in the noon and after that I got some free time!! First, I ate lunch at the hotel and swam a little bit in the hotel’s rooftop pool. After that I went to shopping mall to look for souvenirs. I also had a one thing that I definitely wanted to experience… Thai massage! Luckily, I was able to take a massage without reservation and the place was so good. The price was 520BHT(about ¥2000) for 90 min which was really cheap compared to Japan’s prices.
In the evening we had a last dinner together and we ate Thai suki, which is similar to Japanese nabe (hotpot). We put vegetables, meat, and seafood in the hotpot. The sauce was hot but it tasted really good with the soup.
In these few days I learned many things about Thailand and its business culture, for example:
- To get a regular work permit for foreign employee, company must employ 4 Thai employees for each work permit.
- differences between Thai branch offices, like how much their parent office in Japan effects to them and their work policy.
- Public transportation in Bangkok is limited so lot of people need to commute by car or motorcycle which causes a long traffic jam. There was a lot of bike taxis, too.
After all the meetings, I thought that Japanese company is still very Japanese even if it is a Thai branch. Maybe I thought so because almost all the people we met in meetings were Japanese and the way of communicating and conducting meetings was same as in Japan. In this trip I also learned about sales which was really interesting. I haven’t decided yet but it would be nice to be involved in sales in the future.
In general, was surprised that there were convenience stores everywhere like in Tokyo. There were a lot of Japanese restaurants also and even Japanese supermarket!(I wish it was same in Finland…) I guess Bangkok is quite nice and easy place for Japanese people to live.
In conclusion, trip was exciting and I learned a lot. I am really grateful for this opportunity and thankful for sales team and Thai members for letting me to join the trip!
