After rejoining Jasmine in 2008, Pete went full speed into broadband, rebranding the company’s fledgling service, initially renting capacity from TT&T and others. Then, “when we had a problem,” he invested in Jasmine’s own network and persuaded many of TT&T’s customers to switch. Jasmine initially focused on households in the underserved provinces beyond Bangkok–”up-country”–because of its experience with fixed lines there. Roughly three-quarters of Jasmine’s broadband customers still live beyond greater Bangkok, though many are in urban areas such as Chiang Mai, Pattaya and Phuket. By 2010 Jasmine had moved into the outskirts of Bangkok, where broadband availability was still spotty. Today Jasmine’s 5,000 employees, most of them engineers and technicians, are more than double the number it had at its peak before the 1997 implosion.
Headquarters is the 31-story Jasmine International Tower, 26 kilometers from central Bangkok, on Chaeng Wattana Road. Jasmine and Mono each occupy five floors, and so Pete has two CEO offices; he prefers the Mono one on the top floor. Beyond the glass wall of a conference room, the open-plan office space is occupied by snaky red couches and casually dressed young people, who are hunched over computers and overseen by a wall of screens showing muted music videos.
In a dining corner Pete’s weight–and the weights of other top executives after recent weigh-ins–are posted for all to see. A fitness buff, he explains, “We feel the health of the executives is very important. If you lose one good person, if they have a disease from eating, it’s not very good. That’s why we have our own nutritionist.” (His transparency doesn’t always extend to investors–he gets demerits from financial firms for his reluctance to meet with analysts.) Unmarried, he is unknown on the high-society party circuit. He might arrive at work at 10 a.m. after playing basketball, but he usually works until midnight. “I enjoy being in this building,” he says. He lives 15 minutes away.
Certainly his full attention is an advantage in Jasmine’s battle to overtake rival True. In March he launched a new service that increases broadband speeds to 30 megabits a second. Analysts think the service could have 40,000 subscribers by the end of the year but that it could take at least three years to reach the break-even point of 100,000. “Our service is double the price but triple the speed,” says Pete. “This is a game of speed. More content will come in high definition. For videoing and downstreaming, people will demand more and more bandwidth.”
Another strategy, promoting high-speed Wi-Fi, is likely to pick up subscribers and profits much more quickly. Jasmine forged a partnership in 2011 with the nation’s leading mobile operator, AIS, Thaksin’s old company. For an extra $3.25 a month AIS’ rising number of smartphone customers can gain access to Jasmine’s now 50,000 Wi-Fi hot spots cropping up in stores and coffee shops. Jasmine pockets 70% of the revenue, and, as of the first quarter, it had 425,000 hot spot subscribers.
Mono, for its part, now delivers content developed by itself and others to all three mobile operators, while also producing Android applications, entertainment magazines, boy and girl bands, music videos and a handful of TV shows. Mono has branched out overseas, performing back-end work for mobile carriers in Indonesia and Vietnam and supplying localized content, such as horoscopes, but overall it’s still small, employing only 600 people.
Mono may share the same building with Jasmine, but under Pete’s business model that doesn’t mean it has a monopoly on Jasmine’s broadband pipes. Pete stresses that Mono is separate from Jasmine and aims to treat customers neutrally, even if they are already Jasmine customers. “We know what’s going on in the world. We know how much bandwidth [new forms of content need], so we can profit from it,” says Pete. “With the Mono content business we know that broadband is growing, so there will be more users.”