“I hope that you and your families are as well as possible during these difficult times.
As a Chamber, we continue to navigate the current situation, ensuring that we are providing you our members the best opportunities to stay engaged and updated. For those not yet using this resource, please check out our COVID-19 page on our website. We take information from the Australian Embassy of Thailand amongst other resources to provide as best as possible the most timely, validated information, and we hope this information is of benefit to you all.
I hope you have been able to join some of our webinars recently, so far we have received great feedback from many of you. In case you have missed any of them, all been recorded and exclusively available for our members on our Resources page; topics include:
- AustCham Thailand Virtual Roundtable with Australian Ambassador, H.E. Allan McKinnon (29/04/2020)
- Global Economy Update with Macquarie Group Chief Economist: Update on Global Macro outlook and the way ahead (30/04/2020)
- Legal Update on COVID-19 Update: Current restrictions, Directors’ duties and responsibilities and data privacy (23/04/2020)
- Legal Update on Options for Employers in Thailand During COVID-19 Outbreak (02/04/2020)
- Tax Update on Tax Measures in response to COVID-19 (03/04/2020)
- HR Update on Leadership at a time of crisis (17/04/2020)
- HR Update on Managing Wellness of Your Employees During COVID-19 (14/04/2020)
- HR & Digital Update on The Reality of Remote Working in Thailand (24/03/2020)
- Digital Workshop Series: Top 3 Digital Marketing Strategies to Convert Sales (16/04/2020)
- Digital Workshop Series: COVID-19 – Digital Marketing? What can you do right now! (09/04/2020)
- Digital Workshop Series: Future of Marketing Technology (18/04/2020)
- Health & Wellbeing Update on Protocols for dealing with urgent surgery & vital medical procedures (10/04/2020)
- Property Update on Three Months into the COVID 19 Outbreak: How is the Asia Pacific CRE Marketing coping? (15/04/2020)
- AustCham Members Online Meeting: What’s happening with us? What’s happening with you? (21/04/2020)
- AustCham Thailand Online Meeting with AustCham SB&E Members (27/03/2020)
We will also provide an update from our treasurer Peter Emblin, unfortunately the chamber has not been immune from the current situation. We are actively working on the best possible financial outcome to limit the financial impact. We will continue to keep you updated throughout the year as the financial situation becomes clearer, but we do face a very realistic scenario that the chamber at this point could run at a deficit by a year end. Please rest assured that as a Board we will work tirelessly to balance delivering benefits to our sponsors and members, and further cost savings and revenue generation.
Furthermore we have also been active with advocacy issues with the Thai Government behind the scenes. We understand well the immense pressure our members are facing in their businesses, and as such we have collaborated with our Foreign Chamber Alliance (FCA) and submitted a letter to the Finance Minister and Prime Minister. This letter focused on a very key challenge that all of our members are facing, that of supporting our employees and potential assistance to keep them in employed, and in turn business continuity through coming months. We are currently following up on this letter and other areas and concerns presented to the Board of Trade and will continue to keep you updated on any developments.
We also continue to work with the Australian Embassy in direct consultation with our Ambassador, H.E. Allan McKinnon and key senior members of the Embassy team, this includes a regular strategic meeting held every 6 weeks. At this meeting, we discuss an agenda of items and actions, determining the best next course of action be it formal advocacy, or further investigation. I would ask that if you have any business related issues that we can assist you to table at these meetings to contact Brendan or myself directly.
We are excited to also update you we are actively working on our first ‘Virtual Sundowners’ and look forward to seeing our members at this event on the 7th of May, 6pm onwards, do stay tuned.
I hope like many of you, it will not be too long before we can all meet again in person at our monthly sundowners. Until then I wish you, your teams and all families the all the very best during these difficult times, and please do not hesitate to reach out to Brendan, the AustCham team or myself at any time.
Together as a community, we remain stronger!”
