On August 16, the Thai Parliament elected Paetongtarn Shinawatra as the new Prime Minister. At 37, she is the youngest Prime Minister in the country's history. She is also the third member of the Shinawatra family to become Prime Minister in the past two decades. The other two are her father, Thaksin, and her aunt, Yingluck.

Most of Ms. Paetongtarn’s professional experience since 2011 has been tied to the family’s business empire. She owns stakes in real estate, hotel and telecommunications businesses.

Bloomberg reported that she is the largest shareholder in real estate trading house SC Asset with a 28.5% stake worth about 5.2 billion baht ($152 million). Under the law, she must give up her business role and comply with share ownership rules before taking office .

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New Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra. Photo: Xinhua

According to Bloomberg , the Shinawatra family’s fortune originated in an ancestral silk business. During his 14-year career in the police force, Thaksin branched out into silk retail, cinemas, real estate and computer leasing — with little success — before becoming wealthy during the tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

He is the founder of several businesses in the fields of mobile, pay-TV cable, data networks, and satellites. At its peak, Shin Corporation – now Intouch Holdings – owned the AIS network and Shin Satellite (now Thaicom). Ms. Yingluck was CEO of AIS. The Shinawatra family later sold Shin Corp to Singaporean investment company Temasek in 2006.

In 2014, AIS issued a press release and text message to customers, stating that it was no longer affiliated with the Shinawatra family. “Mr. Thaksin and his family sold all their shares in the company on January 23, 2006, and have no further involvement with the company since then.” The announcement came after a number of Thais returned their SIM cards and stopped using the carrier’s services. On May 7, 2014, the Thai Constitutional Court removed Prime Minister Yingluck from office.

AIS is the largest mobile network operator in Thailand with over 45.7 million subscribers as of September 2022. Founded in 1986, it was the first company to introduce mobile services in the country. Today, AIS provides a wide range of telecommunications services, including fixed and mobile, broadband Internet, and digital television. In addition to traditional mobile services, it also offers value-added services such as AIS Play and AIS Music Store.

AIS owns the largest 5G network in Thailand, covering more than 95% of the country. AIS also holds the most spectrum across low, mid and high bands, totaling more than 1,460MHz. The operator has about 9 million 5G subscribers, accounting for nearly 20% of the total customer base.

At the MWC 2024 Conference, AIS Deputy General Director Mark Chong Chin Kok shared that building a 5G network is not about winning the number 1 position, but about knowing how to use it and make money from it. To do this, AIS has divided customers into many segments and charged fees based on the desired needs of each group.

In addition to simple plans, AIS also offers on-demand broadband and three modes. Through the AIS app, customers can choose between “boost” mode for much faster download speeds, “live” mode for uploading content to social networks like TikTok, and “game” mode for gamers. The result of these efforts is an increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) of 5G subscribers of about 10-15%.

For enterprise customers, AIS also develops diverse usage scenarios. One of them is the Paragon Platform. This is a multi-cloud orchestration platform that orchestrates workloads across multiple clouds.

(Synthetic)