by Dr. Iain
Corness
The name “Srifuengfung” has become synonymous with
horses in Pattaya, and Chainarin Srifuengfung is one of the main players,
being the managing director of the Horseshoe Point Resort and Country
Club.
Chainarin is the “younger” of twin boys born in
Supanburi, the original hometown of his father and grandfather. He comes
from a very strong Chinese-Thai background, and his dedication to his late
father and forebears can be seen in the beautiful pagoda built adjoining
the Horseshoe Point Resort.
As
a boy he went to many schools in Thailand, including Assumption College in
Sriracha and then at age 14 he was sent to boarding college in California,
finishing his schooling in a Christian Brothers high school in Sacramento.
Chainarin wanted a career where he would be independent
of his parents, and yet do something to make his father proud. He decided
that would be the military, a classical way of showing manhood. He
returned to Thailand and informed his father of his decision, to be told,
“I thought you said you were going to be a man. In the military you are
not in charge of yourself. To be a man you have to be a businessman who
faces the world by himself and who has to fight the whole world by
himself. That is a man.”
Suitably chastened, he dropped thoughts of the military
and enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York,
graduating four years later in Industrial Management with a major in
Business Management and Accounting.
Graduates from the RIT are in demand by many of the
world’s large corporations and Chainarin was headhunted by Eastman Kodak
to join their workforce in Thailand. However, it was not the job for him
and he joined the Exxon Corporation as a consumer sales representative to
industry. “This was where I learned about industry - from small family
businesses to large multi-nationals. It gave me an insight into Thai
industrialization.”
However Srifuengfung Senior was still not satisfied,
saying, “Why can’t you be a manager?” Chainarin began to wonder just
what did he have to do to make his father appreciate his efforts.
He decided that he should be in banking and the newly
formed Thai Investment and Security Company (TISCO) was recruiting for
staff. As they needed people with marketing and sales experience, he got a
position and he was soon off and running. “We were really pioneers.
First we had to educate ourselves and then educate the customers!”
The young Chainarin was quick to learn and his own
career really started to take off. He was again headhunted to join the
Chase Manhattan Bank and became the first Thai Director for the Chase
Manhattan Investment Company.
After this, Chainarin was prepared to contribute to the
family businesses. “I was now ready to go to my family and give them
(the concept of) a finance company.” This was formed and was called the
Cathay Trust Company Limited, but Chainarin knew that to give credibility
to this, they needed a building. His father had plans of constructing one
on land owned in Bangkok, but Chainarin had other ideas. He knew that his
old employers Exxon wanted to sell their headquarters and he advised his
father that it would make better business sense to buy the Exxon building
and lease it back to them. At long last, he had earned his father’s
respect, who listened to him and the deal was done, the building being
renamed the Cathay Trust building. (Incidentally, the building is now
called the Srifuengfung building.)
To prepare for expansion Chainarin knew he needed a
foreign bank as a venture partner and negotiated a deal with the Royal
Bank of Canada. This produced business using short-term funds, but he knew
they had to look at long term funds, so they branched out into life
insurance. Again his knowledge of how the industry worked came to the fore
and he negotiated an association with the Siam Commercial Bank (SCB),
forming the SCB Life Insurances.
His father asked him to run a project in the petro-chemical
industry, producing LAB, a sudsing agent for the detergent industry.
However, it was not the right time. The Gulf War produced escalation in
prices and after looking at the environmental impact, Chainarin decided
that this business had no future and the project was dropped.
In 1992 his father passed away and the family members
were now on their own. Chainarin began to mastermind a huge transport and
logistics project, but with the collapse of the baht and the IMF, this
rather “pet” project of his had to be dropped.
His next project was the Horseshoe Point Resort and
Country Club, using land that had been in the family for 30 years. “It
had been our hideaway, but now we had to make it self sufficient.”
For this self-driven businessman, success is success in
a business project. It is all a question of economics. “If what you do
is successful, then you have personally succeeded.”
His advice to the youth of Thailand was a strong
message of avoiding envy and learning to develop their own talents.
“There is no short-cut. You have to learn to jump life’s hurdles. They
have to be more creative, more outspoken, more daring and more self
reliant. This builds self confidence.”
His hobbies include collecting antiques, hats and
matches, opera, golf and of course, his horses. He has ridden all his life
and his heart lies with his horses. “It is every young boy’s dream to
have a special horse showing love and loyalty towards its master. The Lone
Ranger had Silver, Roy Rogers had Trigger. I think I’ve found mine.”
And so the interview with the man in the denim shirt
and jeans came to a conclusion. He smoked Marlboro’s throughout and
after it was over would go down to the stables to talk his special horse.
Despite being a corporate “high flyer”, Chainarin Srifuengfung has his
riding boots firmly on the ground.
