Three BOI promoted activities now require majority Thai shareholding

01What actually changed

Under the relevant BOI announcements, applications submitted from 1 September 2025 carry a new condition on three promoted activities: Thai individuals must hold more than half the shares. Projects inside the border special economic zones are exempt (source 1). The three activities are:

• leather and artificial leather bags and luggage (footwear excluded);
• furniture and parts;
• printed matter.

If your project lands in one of these three, the usual assumption that a manufacturing project can be wholly foreign-owned does not hold on the promotion route. Either you accept Thai majority shareholding, or you re-examine whether to apply for promotion at all — and whether the business could properly sit under a different activity code.

Be clear about what kind of rule this is: it is a BOI condition for promotion, not an amendment to the law on foreign market access. If you do not apply for promotion, the shareholding rules that apply to these businesses are the ones that applied before. That decides how to respond. The question is not whether foreigners can still be in this line of business; it is whether the promotion route is worth what it costs you in shareholding.

02Why this one deserves its own page

Three reasons.

• It splits by filing date. Applications submitted before 1 September 2025 are unaffected. Projects still preparing material and not yet filed are the ones that most need to check.
• It touches only three activities, but the effect is structural. Majority Thai shareholding means the control arrangements, the profit distribution and the exit route all have to be redesigned. It is not one more condition on the same plan; it is a different plan.
• Older material hides it. "Manufacturing in Thailand can be 100% foreign-owned" is the single most repeated line of the past few years. It is still broadly true — see whether a wholly foreign-owned manufacturing project can still get BOI — but it now has exceptions. When you read that line, ask one more question: which activity category is mine?

03If your project might be one of the three

Work through it in this order.

• Fix the activity category first. One business often maps to several promoted activity codes, and where it lands decides which conditions apply. That was always the first step in a tier assessment; it now carries an extra consequence.
• Confirm the site. Projects inside the border special economic zones are exempt, so the location decision may also be a shareholding decision.
• Do the sum. Whether the relief that comes with promoted status is worth accepting Thai majority shareholding depends on your investment size, your profit expectations and how much control you need. This is a calculation to actually run, not a question of principle.
• If you decide against the promotion route, foreign shareholding and market access go back to the ordinary rules, and you then have to check separately whether the business falls on the restricted lists for foreign operation — see how foreign shareholding works under the Foreign Business Act.

04The wider lesson

BOI's promotion conditions and incentive catalogue move with each announcement. A full revision usually comes round every two or three years, with separate announcements on individual activities in between. The conditions you read today may already have been superseded by the time you file.

So at the tier assessment stage our advisers work this way: once the activity category is settled, go back to the official announcements in force and work through every condition currently attached to that category — not only the incentives, but shareholding, investment size, value added and technology requirements as well. It costs little time, and what it prevents is the kind of rework where the plan is finished before anyone notices the premise changed.

Which activity code your project actually falls under, whether this new rule reaches it, whether your site qualifies for the exemption, and what the alternative looks like if you skip promotion all have to be checked item by item against what the business actually does and what the investment plan says, and re-checked against the official announcements before you file. What the BOI filing engagement covers.