Jay Mart’s Hypergrowth Propels Founder Adisak Sukumvitaya To The Ranks Of Thailand’s 50 Richest

This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Thailand’s Richest 2022. See the full list here.

Adisak Sukumvitaya parlayed Jay Mart from a single store into a tech-driven retailing and financial services group with a total market cap of $6.5 billion. And he’s still dreaming big.

When Thailand’s stock exchange recently rejigged its SET50 Index, an index of the biggest companies by market cap, Adisak Sukumvitaya emerged a winner. Admitted were his flagship company Jay Mart plus its debt collection and management unit JMT Network Services, both among the hottest Thai stocks in the past year—up 54% and 74%, respectively—while the index fell more than 3%. The double-entry was a seminal event for the Jay Mart founder and CEO, who opened his first shop, selling household appliances, in 1989.

“For me, it’s a big reward in my entrepreneurial journey of 33 years,” says Adisak, 66, at Jay House, his sprawling mansion in a gated enclave 30 kilometers from Bangkok’s central business district. The walls are adorned with paintings by local artists. Displayed more discreetly are artworks by Adisak himself, who says he paints occasionally to relax.

From his retailing roots, Adisak has grown that single store into the Jaymart group, with the listed Jay Mart as its flagship holding company. Jay Mart has stakes in three publicly traded companies and a clutch of privately held firms. The company’s businesses largely fall into three main buckets: retail, finance and tech. They span the spectrum from distributing and retailing mobile phones, IT products and electrical appliances to debt management and collection, financial services, coffee shops and tech. Jaymart Mobile sells mobile phones through 200 stores across Thailand. Jay Mart’s finance arms offer consumer loans and non-life insurance. Its tech unit J Ventures develops emerging tech such as AI, blockchain and big data and is building a metaverse platform.

Network Effect

The listed Jay Mart holds stakes in a variety of businesses.

Amid Thailand’s slow economic recovery, Jay Mart produced a record 2021 net profit of 2.5 billion baht ($71 million), a threefold rise from the previous year, on revenue of 12.3 billion baht. Jay Mart’s soaring shares propelled Adisak—who with his wife Yuvadee Pong-Acha, is a major shareholder—into the ranks of the 50 richest with an estimated fortune of $835 million. Jay Mart and its associated companies—property developer JAS Asset, JMT Network and direct selling firm Singer Thailand—have a combined market cap of $6.5 billion.

“From small beginnings, Adisak has grown Jay Mart exponentially, building it through strategic acquisitions and partnerships,” says veteran banker Kongkiat Opaswongkarn, CEO, Asia Plus Securities, the lead investment bank for the group’s three IPOs. The firm also orchestrated Jay Mart’s 2015 acquisition of a 25% stake in Singer Thailand, the local unit of the storied American company whose founder invented the sewing machine in 1850.

Since the start of the pandemic, the tycoon has worked from home, doing board meetings on Zoom. Not only does that save him the commute to Jaymart Building, the corporate headquarters, but it has forced him, he says, to give senior executives more of a free hand. He’s now building an extension to his house with a conference room for meetings. “Working remotely suits me,” he declares.

Power Point

Jay Mart’s net profit hit a record 2.5 billion baht last year.

Adisak has kept making connections throughout the pandemic. As Thailand’s banks struggled with rising nonperforming loans, Adisak saw an opportunity to boost JMT Network’s business and formed two joint ventures with Bangkok-based Kasikorn Bank for debt collection and asset management. He converted finance arm J Fintech into KB J Capital, a consumer finance joint venture with Korean credit card company KB Kookmin Card. Jay Mart’s software unit J Ventures bagged an investment from Japanese IT firm TIS. Adisak has recently forayed into renewables with a partnership between listee Gunkul Dhumrongpiyawut’s Gunkul Engineering, Jay Mart and Singer Thailand that plans to sell solar panels.

The biggest deal was with Skytrain billionaire Keeree Kanjapanas’s BTS Group, which invested 17.5 billion baht to acquire 25% of both Jay Mart and Singer Thailand. Adisak, friends with Keeree’s son Kavin for two decades, says they hope to benefit from cross-selling synergies as the two companies, between them, have 17 million customers. Jay Mart could set up shops for appliances and mobile phones at BTS train stations, which could also become a sales channel for Singer Thailand, says FSS International Investment Advisory Securities analyst Naruedom Mujjalinkool, who is based in Bangkok.

“We can now grow three times faster and reach the next level.”

With the new partners and planned investments of 30 billion baht this year, Adisak asserts, “we can now grow three times faster and reach the next level.” His target is to grow Jay Mart’s net profit 50% annually over the next three years. “The top line doesn’t mean anything without profits. You can’t keep standing for too long without profits,” he asserts.

Adisak was born in Bangkok but moved to Yala, Thailand’s southernmost province, where his father opened a shoe repair shop. At age 17, Adisak went to Iowa for a year as a high school exchange student. The year was a turning point in his life, he says. “It was such a different world. I started to dream in English.”

During his American stint, he took to sports—baseball, wrestling, golf—which became an abiding interest. On Saturdays he plays soccer with friends and company executives at a private, 1.2ha sports field he built next to his home. “When I was young, I had nowhere to play,” he recounts.

After getting a degree in agricultural economics from Bangkok’s Kasetsart University, Adisak wanted to return to the U.S. for graduate studies but couldn’t afford it. So he enrolled in a master’s program at Kasetsart on a scholarship, supplementing it by working on campus doing market research. His first job in 1982 was in investment research at Thai securities firm Tisco, where he met his wife Yuvadee. A couple of years later, he shifted to consumer durables giant Philips as an assistant product manager.

Four years later, Adisak ventured out on his own. “It was a risky move but I asked myself—do you want to remain poor or do you want to give a better life to your family?” he says. After studying the business model of Singer, which sold sewing machines and household appliances on a hire-purchase plan (also known as an installment plan), Adisak was confident that there was room for another player.

The couple pooled their combined savings of 2 million baht to set up Jay Mart, replicating the Singer model but selling other brands of electronics and appliances, such as Panasonic, Hitachi and Philips. The company’s name was inspired by Kmart, where Adisak shopped when in Iowa. “Jay” came from the initials of their names, including daughter Juthamas. It’s also the nickname of their son Ekachai, born the year the first Jay Mart store opened.

In 1992, Jay Mart added mobile phones, offering brands such as Nokia and Ericsson on an installment basis. Sales picked up but before long Adisak was blindsided by the entry of Japanese financial services company Aeon. Realizing he could not match Aeon’s low-interest loans, Adisak decided to start another business: debt collection. He figured that he could deploy Jay Mart’s field staff, who were experienced in collecting installment payments, to collect unsecured consumer loans for other companies. Adisak says that seeing bigger mobile phone sellers shut down taught him to never depend on just one business.

But one of his bets went badly wrong after he invested 2 million baht in a venture set up by some friends to manufacture television sets. The business was mismanaged and within three years it was on the brink of closure, with a debt of 30 million baht. With his reputation in jeopardy, Adisak agreed to take on the entire debt and began looking urgently for ways to pay it off.

He approached Aeon, offering to structure a hire-purchase model for mobile phones with an undertaking to buy them back if customers defaulted. The 400 baht service fee Jay Mart received on every phone financed by Aeon earned the company 700 million baht over seven years. This paid off the debt and helped grow Jay Mart into one of Thailand’s top mobile phone distributors.

Adisak says he’s looked for opportunities in every crisis. After the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, when others hunkered down, he opened more stores. He approached retailing giant Central group, which offered to lease him a car park at one of its Big C hypermarkets. “In business,” says Adisak, “I never say no. In fact, when others say ‘no,’ I say ‘yes.’”

“In business, I never say no. In fact, when others say ‘no,’ I say ‘yes.’”

He converted the car park into a mini mall of small shops for phone vendors. Tenants were initially hard to find and the business made a loss the first year. To kickstart it, he opened 20 mobile phone stores under different names, a ploy that created enough of a buzz to draw in tenants. This was expanded to 40 locations under IT Junction, a thriving division within Jay Mart, which in 2015 was spun off as property development arm JAS Asset.

By 2002, Adisak was eyeing a public listing for his flagship to grow more quickly. But Jay Mart’s IPO application was rejected that year and again in 2005 as the company then couldn’t meet the regulatory requirements. Adisak says his wife, who has been working with him since 1994, advised him to forget it, but he refused. “I knew that if I surrendered, I would have no future,” he recalls. He succeeded in 2009, raising 133 million baht through an IPO that valued Jay Mart at 540 million baht, a valuation that has since soared to 79 billion baht.

The IPO funds were used to pay off loans and to expand the debt collection unit, which he took public in 2012. JMT’s IPO raised 333 million baht and valued the company at 3.6 billion baht. In the past decade, JMT’s market cap has grown 30 times to 107 billion baht. Three years later, Jay Mart spun off JAS Asset and listed it at a valuation of 1 billion baht.

In 2015, Jay Mart made a landmark acquisition, paying 950 million baht for a 25% stake in Singer Thailand, a company Adisak had long admired and whose business model he had successfully replicated. “Our CFO said we had no money, but I couldn’t let it go,” he recalls. He raised funds through a mix of bank loans and selling part of Jay Mart’s stake in JMT. “Singer has been in Thailand for 133 years. It’s exactly a century older than Jay Mart,” says Adisak, adding that he’s now preparing to list its finance arm SG Capital.

Five years ago, Adisak expanded into fintech, establishing J Ventures under Jay Mart. In 2018, it launched the country’s first initial coin offering by a public company, selling 100 million JFinCoins within three days. Adisak sees himself as Thailand’s crypto pioneer and is confident that the country’s recent regulation banning cryptocurrencies will be temporary.

Adisak had initially planned to retire this year, but after the capital injection from BTS, he says that plan was postponed for a couple of years. He’s grooming his U.S.-educated son Ekachai, who’s been working with him for eight years and is Jay Mart’s deputy CEO, to succeed him. “He’s the right guy at the right time,” he avers.

At present, Adisak is focused on delivering his growth goal and making every business a market leader in its segment. “I don’t believe in eating dust, but making dust,” he says, a reference to a car race on a dirt track where the vehicle in the lead creates a dust storm.

Challenges abound. Naruedom of FSS points out that while JMT Network is already one of the biggest players in debt collection, the emergence of more competitors bidding aggressively for nonperforming loans could chip away at profits. Moreover, an economic slowdown could impact sales of household appliances. Adisak says the crises he’s weathered in the past have taught him never to underestimate any situation.

While wealth allows him to indulge in such passions as collecting fine wines, Adisak says he hasn’t forgotten his roots; he prefers street food to fine dining. With two of his biggest companies in the SET 50, Adisak is aware that he’s now in the ring with the big boys: “But it’s only the first step. I want to step up and win.”

—Additional reporting by Anuradha Raghunathan