I’m Endo from IIJ Thailand.
When doing business in Thailand, the biggest cultural gap that people new to Japan first encounter is the difference in the pace of business negotiations and the "setting" of those negotiations. In Japan, email is highly valued as formal evidence of business, and it is considered good manners to include your superior in the CC field and carefully choose your words before sending an email.
However, a completely different dynamic is at play on the ground in Thailand. Among Thai staff members, or between Thai customers and suppliers, they exchange business cards, and within minutes they add each other as friends on LINE. Later that evening, they casually send messages like, "Can you send me the documents we discussed today as a PDF?"
LINE's penetration rate in Thailand is tremendous.More than 8 million people, or about 5,000% of the population, use it on a daily basis.This represents a higher penetration rate than in Japan, and for people in Thailand, LINE is not merely a means of private communication, but a "standard infrastructure" that drives society.
What's amazing is that this has spread not only among colleagues within a company, but also to B2B customer service, and even to interactions with government offices and public services. Even with executives, a single stamp can be used to confirm understanding. The overwhelming speed at which LINE melts away the barriers of physical distance and job title is so remarkable that once you experience it, email exchanges that take several days to complete seem incredibly tedious.
However, from the perspective of someone responsible for managing the IT operations of a branch office, this is nothing less than a highly risky "shadow IT" situation. The reality is that Thai employees routinely exchange confidential company quotations, negotiation details, and even highly sensitive design drawings using their personal LINE accounts.
It's easy to say, from a Japanese perspective, "Ban LINE, limit chat tools to company-provided ones." However, doing so would immediately cause the Thai business environment to falter, leaving competitors behind. In the Thai business world, speed of response is the most important indicator of trust, and restricting communication to email literally leads to lost business opportunities. From the perspective of local staff, this directly leads to dissatisfaction, such as, "Why ban the most powerful tool that everyone in Thailand uses?"
The important thing is not to reject this unique Thai culture of "blazing-fast communication," but rather to lay a secure track for it using IT. For example, everyday communication could leverage the speed of LINE, while data storage and sharing could always be done via a secure cloud storage link URL approved within the company.
Instead of directly pasting files into the LINE chat screen, allowing users to "reference" data stored in the cloud allows you to control access rights in case of employee departure or loss.
Instead of forcing Japanese standards onto local norms, leverage the power of the culture to maximize business opportunities. The key to success for a Thai base lies in designing flexible IT governance that leverages infrastructure used daily by over 5,000 million people.
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