Amata Corporation, the Thai industrial park developer founded by Vikrom Kromadit, has built one of Southeast Asia's largest footprints for relocating manufacturers, now hosting more than 1,500 factories across roughly 700 square kilometers of land spanning 12 locations in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.
The company's first site, Amata City Chon Buri, opened in Thailand in 1989, the same period Kromadit founded Amata after running an import-export business. It expanded into Vietnam the following year, eventually launching Amata City Bien Hoa in Dong Nai province in 1994, and has more recently pushed into Laos, where it opened Amata City Namor in 2022, a 31.5 square kilometer development near the China-Laos Railway that the company envisions eventually growing to 200 square kilometers.
The expansion rides two overlapping trends: manufacturers pursuing a so called China plus one strategy to diversify production away from China, and pressure from US tariffs on Chinese-origin goods, both of which have pushed companies to look for new manufacturing bases across Southeast Asia. Laos offers a particular advantage on the energy side, exporting roughly 80 percent of its electricity output and drawing on more than 80 hydroelectric plants with upwards of 12 gigawatts of capacity, making cheap, reliable power a selling point for energy-intensive tenants.