Source @thailand_news
But look at who the reform actually rescues. It was built for the people who needed it least
ty structure, and you do not stop them. You simply guarantee that the entire foreign community is operating through the one arrangement you have privately decided to treat as a crime. Then the politics shift, the enforcement arrives, and the people who walked through the only unlocked door are recast as criminals, while the law that locked all the others stands untouched, blameless, still on the books.
Our designer has done nothing the law did not herd him into doing. And the proof that this was always a self-inflicted wound is sitting in the news right now, because Thailand has quietly begun to admit the whole logic was broken. The good news, and it is real
Give Thailand genuine credit here, because this is the most significant liberalisation of its foreign business rules in a generation, and it should be said plainly.
On 22 April 2025 the Cabinet approved in principle a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Business Act, the first serious overhaul in twenty-seven years, explicitly reframing the law’s purpose from “protecting local industry” to “building competitive potential.” Then on 12 May 2026 it went further, approving two draft instruments that would lift the licensing requirement from nine reserved categories outright. It is worth being precise about what this is. These are draft measures, approved in principle and sent to the Office of the Council of State for review, not yet enacted law. They take effect only once published in the Government Gazette, a step that lawyers caution may not arrive before 2027, if it arrives at all. The motive, though, is no secret. Thailand wants to join the OECD, which measures exactly this kind of openness through its FDI Restrictiveness Index, and on that index Thailand still ranks among the more closed economies measured. Add the 4.0 agenda, the Eastern Economic Corridor, the courting of data centres and semiconductors and skilled investors, and you have a government that has decided the old wall is a liability and started pulling bricks out of it.
This is the right direction, and it is the rarest note in this entire series: Thailand looking at a barrier it built, recognising that the barrier was manufacturing the very behaviour it disliked, and choosing to lower it rather than just police the wreckage. If the property file were handled with the same logic, this series would be a great deal shorter.
But look at who the reform actually rescues. It was built for the people who needed it least
The categories being freed read like a memo from a corporate boardroom: treasury centres, intra-group administrative services provided only to other companies in the same group, in-group credit guarantees, derivatives services, petroleum drilling. These are the concerns of multinationals, the firms that arrive with a compliance department and a team of lawyers, structure their entry with care, and were never within a mile of a nominee in the first place. For them, the reform is a real and useful simplification. The one category on the list that might have reached a smaller operator, software development, sat among the proposals in January and was then quietly dropped before the May approval, after agencies raised concerns about the impact on Thailand’s own digital industry. The pattern could hardly be sharper. Where a delisting would simply let foreign capital serve other foreign capital, the door opens. Where it might let a foreigner compete with Thai operators, the door stays shut.
The designer is still an “other service business.” So is the chef, the clinic, the dive school, the small marketing consultant, the foreigner who wants to run a modest, honest, job-creating little enterprise without assembling a Thai-majority shareholding to do it. The very operators who helped raise Thailand’s everyday standard to world-class look at the great liberalisation of 2026 and find their own situation almost exactly as it was. The catch-all clause that traps them is still there. The licence is still slow and stil[...]
← Back to newsOur designer has done nothing the law did not herd him into doing. And the proof that this was always a self-inflicted wound is sitting in the news right now, because Thailand has quietly begun to admit the whole logic was broken. The good news, and it is real
Give Thailand genuine credit here, because this is the most significant liberalisation of its foreign business rules in a generation, and it should be said plainly.
On 22 April 2025 the Cabinet approved in principle a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Business Act, the first serious overhaul in twenty-seven years, explicitly reframing the law’s purpose from “protecting local industry” to “building competitive potential.” Then on 12 May 2026 it went further, approving two draft instruments that would lift the licensing requirement from nine reserved categories outright. It is worth being precise about what this is. These are draft measures, approved in principle and sent to the Office of the Council of State for review, not yet enacted law. They take effect only once published in the Government Gazette, a step that lawyers caution may not arrive before 2027, if it arrives at all. The motive, though, is no secret. Thailand wants to join the OECD, which measures exactly this kind of openness through its FDI Restrictiveness Index, and on that index Thailand still ranks among the more closed economies measured. Add the 4.0 agenda, the Eastern Economic Corridor, the courting of data centres and semiconductors and skilled investors, and you have a government that has decided the old wall is a liability and started pulling bricks out of it.
This is the right direction, and it is the rarest note in this entire series: Thailand looking at a barrier it built, recognising that the barrier was manufacturing the very behaviour it disliked, and choosing to lower it rather than just police the wreckage. If the property file were handled with the same logic, this series would be a great deal shorter.
But look at who the reform actually rescues. It was built for the people who needed it least
The categories being freed read like a memo from a corporate boardroom: treasury centres, intra-group administrative services provided only to other companies in the same group, in-group credit guarantees, derivatives services, petroleum drilling. These are the concerns of multinationals, the firms that arrive with a compliance department and a team of lawyers, structure their entry with care, and were never within a mile of a nominee in the first place. For them, the reform is a real and useful simplification. The one category on the list that might have reached a smaller operator, software development, sat among the proposals in January and was then quietly dropped before the May approval, after agencies raised concerns about the impact on Thailand’s own digital industry. The pattern could hardly be sharper. Where a delisting would simply let foreign capital serve other foreign capital, the door opens. Where it might let a foreigner compete with Thai operators, the door stays shut.
The designer is still an “other service business.” So is the chef, the clinic, the dive school, the small marketing consultant, the foreigner who wants to run a modest, honest, job-creating little enterprise without assembling a Thai-majority shareholding to do it. The very operators who helped raise Thailand’s everyday standard to world-class look at the great liberalisation of 2026 and find their own situation almost exactly as it was. The catch-all clause that traps them is still there. The licence is still slow and stil[...]