KOMSAN TORTERMVASANA
Col Sanpachai Huvanandana will become the next president of CAT Telecom after serving as acting president for 18 months.
The recruitment committee is scheduled to announce his selection today, a committee source said.
CAT attempted to recruit a new president in three rounds starting in November 2014. No candidate applied in the first two rounds, while only one candidate applied in the third round but was disqualified.
The fourth round of recruitment started in April, with three outside candidates and Col Sanpachai, a member of CAT's board of directors.
The source said the result will be submitted to the CAT board for approval before the job contract is signed in July.
Col Sanpachai has said CAT is on the verge of developing two significant projects to serve development of the country's digital economy in the first stage.
The first project is expanding more submarine cable routes to enhance the capacity of the country's core digital infrastructure under a 5-billion-baht investment budget sponsored by the government.
Creating new submarine cable routes will reduce the cost of international internet connections for internet service providers.
CAT Telecom now owns six submarine cable routes in Thailand, while another state telecom, TOT Plc, owns two.
The government is studying whether CAT should go it alone by expanding submarine cable routes or jointly build with private telecom companies. Five telecom companies last month expressed interest to the government in jointly investing with CAT.
The second project is construction of national data centres to serve the government's digital economy policy.
CAT has data centres in seven major provinces consisting of 1,000 racks of servers.
Col Sanpachai said CAT has the capability and capacity to rent its data centre facilities to state agencies and private companies that want a data centre with high security and reliability.
Even though data centre business generated revenue of 2.6 billion baht in 2015, accounting for only 5% of CAT's revenue, the business showed the greatest growth potential thanks to the development of the digital economy.
CAT reported a profit of 3.4 billion baht on revenue of 53.5 billion baht in 2015.
Col Sanpachai said several ICT companies have expressed interest in partnering CAT to develop data centre facilities.
"We are in talks with some potential partners, with plans to select only two companies for partnerships," he said.