Philips Medical Systems International has opened a regional headquarters for Southeast Asia in Bangkok, Thailand. The existing Philips Medical organization in Thailand will be expanded to provide sales and customer support in the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other national markets in the region, said Hans van Bree, president and CEO.
The Bangkok regional center, which opened in February, replaces a regional management system based out of worldwide PMSI headquarters in Best, the Netherlands. Philips has set up similar regional medical systems organizations in the Middle East and Latin America over the past year, van Bree said.
"Our concept for worldwide sales is to combine countries and create centers of competence, where knowledge essential to the support of marketing can be shared," he told SCAN.
While countries outside of Europe, the U.S. and Japan amount to only about 20% of the global market for medical imaging systems, major vendors must invest in these regions to position themselves for greater demand many years in the future. Philips has no desire, for instance, to cede the Southeast Asia market to powerful Japanese medical vendors like Toshiba, he said.
The Bangkok center should provide Philips with a logistical advantage over firms that base support for Southeast Asia in Japan. The distance from Tokyo to Bangkok is comparable to that between Amsterdam and New York, he noted. PMSI will continue to support North Asian markets out of Japan.
Thailand was chosen as the base for regional headquarters because of its relatively large number of hospitals and radiologists and its fast growing economy. The country also offers special connections to emerging markets in the area, such as Vietnam, van Bree said.
Regional support centers allow PMSI to exert a greater presence in the area without having to assign modality specialists and other support personnel to each national market, he said.
PMSI annual sales amount to over 3 billion guilders (about $1.8 billion), or 15% to 20% of the worldwide medical imaging market, according to Philips' statistics.
