Central Retail “IPOed”, as no one could have missed from my and other posts. The 2nd largest retail IPO globally and largest IPO in Thailand ever. History has been made.

Digital Platforms and OMNI Channel, positioning versus new entrants and teaming with partners, played a key role in the journey to the IPO. This journey started for me exactly 3 years ago when I joined in Feb 2017, as Group CTO.

The mandate was to build technical, digital, data, CRM, and OMNI Commerce deep capabilities in Technology and around the group. Starting a new “firm” of now ~250 staff, which is unlike in other corporations really a startup firm. Most of us Techies are coming from startups and tech companies like Zalora, Lazada, Ascend, Reuters, Amazon, Google, aCommerce, of course, also Central folks, and many others.

It was a partly crazy and “sleep at the office” type of journey, building new teams, coding new tools and platforms, using cloud like AWS and Google, but using our framework we build out platforms for 10 different businesses (sorry for all the mistakes to my colleagues) in weeks and months. Now, we deliver every 2 weeks a sprint with new capabilities for each. More productive and more features.

The process of building Product Management, Data Science, delivering new platforms, and all, educated me, the tech team, but also the users. It was tough and had (has) ups and downs, but this is what transformation is! Building capabilities, digitizing, and being lean!

There is no fast path. There is no magical pill you can throw at a vendor and be done. You can buy a piece of software, but you have to learn it yourself. This is tough. We have done that better than any company I know. Faster than anyone I know!

Many excellent people have contributed to build this IPO and thanks to them we are at this stage, great teaming, and good thinking – the tech team build the road for this journey, some bumps, and now its has been done.

This tech startup has grown up and now is established, thrives to the next goals ahead of time, the next S sure to reach. I remain excited and am looking forward.

Thanks all at Central Tech for making this day possible.Thanks to friends and family for all the help and understanding on down and up days 🙂 .. more to come …

Congrats to all for this success. Let the next chapter shine even brighter.