Turnaround and Restructuring in Thailand and Asia
HundredEast, an independent advisory firm in Bangkok, helps owners and parent groups turn around loss-making businesses in Thailand and Asia.
Where this usually starts
Repeated budget misses and deteriorating cash conversion eventually force the owner of a business in Thailand, or its foreign parent's headquarters, to act. That can mean a restructuring, a change in management, or a new strategy, and the owner needs the root cause of the losses before choosing between them. Another forecast offers little reassurance if the causes of the losses remain untested.
HundredEast traces the losses through margins, working capital, cost commitments, and management's capacity to deliver recovery. That includes looking beyond reported performance at the controls, information, and decision-making practices behind it. Immediate cash requirements must be considered alongside the expenditure needed to retain customers and sustain operations.
With owners and line management, HundredEast develops a recovery plan with agreed priorities, decision authority and accountability for delivery. During implementation, it works with the responsible managers to review financial and operating progress, address obstacles and recommend changes where results fall short or assumptions no longer hold. Owners receive a clear assessment of progress and the decisions required. Where the evidence no longer supports recovery, the work provides a basis for assessing exit options or court-supervised business rehabilitation, a route that legal specialists lead.
What gets decided
- An independent business review of the commercial, operational and financial causes of losses, and the priorities for corrective action
- The changes to organizational structure, business processes and internal controls required to support recovery
- Cash-flow priorities, working-capital measures and the liquidity required to sustain operations through recovery
- Which customer relationships, product lines and sites to retain, restructure or exit
- Leadership responsibilities, decision-making authority and accountability for executing the turnaround plan
- Financial and operational milestones for assessing recovery progress and deciding whether to continue the turnaround or pursue an exit
Two engagements
As managing director, HundredEast's founder took responsibility for an industrial services business that had been losing money for a decade. Headquarters attributed the losses to local management capability. Examining the operation exposed serious control failures and information that had not been reaching the owners. The accepted explanation did not account for what was happening inside the business.
Speaking Thai and understanding the working culture helped him uncover issues the existing reporting had missed. He created a channel through which employees could raise concerns without having to approach headquarters over their managers' heads. The intervention addressed the organization, authority limits, and the underlying control failures.
The business returned to profitability within 18 months. He carried responsibility for both the corrective work and the financial result. The recovery began by challenging the diagnosis on which headquarters had based its decisions for years, then acting on what the operation actually required.
At a manufacturer in Thailand, he also took over a customer recovery from a top-tier strategy consultancy the company had brought in to save its largest account at the time, roughly 40 percent of the plant's revenue. The plant was on the customer's supplier improvement program, a status few suppliers clear quickly. He brought it off the program in nine months, against the customer's own two-year estimate, and the account stayed.
How an engagement runs
- 01
A first conversation carries no fee and no obligation.
- 02
What follows is an independent review, a health check of the business, its finances and its controls, scoped in working days against a fixed fee agreed before it starts, ending in a written report that carries the diagnosis and the proposal for a mandate.
- 03
Mandate fees are then structured around the number of entities, countries, sites and people the work has to cover.
Hourly rates are excluded.
Coordinated specialists
Legal and intellectual property, audit and tax, customs, data protection, product registration and executive search. Each is handled by a specialist you engage directly, so you see their fees and contract with the people carrying the professional liability.
Once the cause is known
Board Advisory
Authority limits and board reporting that hold after the recovery.
Market Entry & International Expansion
For companies entering Thailand, and Thai and Asian companies expanding into Europe and North America, from the commercial case to route to market.
Setting Up in Thailand
For foreign companies setting up in Thailand, with premises, staffing, permits and capital planned together and the licensed specialists coordinated.
Results not where they should be?
Most engagements start with somebody describing a situation that looks a lot like the one above.
References are available on request. Introductions can be arranged, in advance.