[NASDAQ:SUNW] will slow down investment in Asia as the Asian financial crisis has led to lower growth here, marketing
director Asia South George Lee said.
"We're not dis-investing in Asia but we're not just building investment as much as before," Mr Lee told Newsbytes.
The investment reduction will mostly impact certain regions and areas, such as development work being done in Japan, while
expansion in Southeast Asia will be slowed down in terms of the number of staff employed.
"In terms of the amount of budget, our investment budget this year is almost the same as 1997."
In Thailand, Sun is recruiting new staff. Sun has 21 employees here and is expected to add 1-2 more persons this year.
Last year, the sales revenue of Southeast Asia rose some 40 percent, compared to 70 percent growth in 1996. This year the
growth rate is projected at 25 percent.
Of the four countries in Southeast Asia, Malaysia showed the least growth. Thailand's performance was up 50 percent.
Sun Microsystems country director Thailand, Therasak Tangpoonphonvivat, said Sun was going to implement a new marketing
model in Thailand by introducing a new distribution channel called Peak Product Distributor (PPD) group.
PPD would emphasis the workgroup server through the reseller network only.
"While distributors are allowed to sell workgroup servers directly and through resellers, PPD will sell the products through
resellers only. However, if a PPD wants to sell the servers directly, they can do it but they won't get an extra discount," he said.
Mr Therasak added that he expected to appoint some 4-5 PPDs this year, but would allow all three existing distributors to
apply for the program first.
This year, he said, Sun forecast that workgroup servers would grow faster than enterprise servers due to limited budgets in
organizations. He expected to see flat growth in revenue this year in terms of dollars.
Talking about Java in Thailand, Therasak said there are a few projects on Java in the works but they were still confidential. He
hoped to see more activities on Java after the launching of the Java Thai OS, expected in the next couple of months.
"Right now there is a Java Training Centre at Siam Media and a Java language curriculum at Assumption University," he said. |
