Thailand BOI application: from tier analysis to certificate

01Which projects should talk to us

• Manufacturing projects choosing a site, or with the site already fixed, preparing to build in Thailand — the category BOI promotion covers most fully, and the one we handle most often.
• Projects where the company is already registered but promotion has not been applied for — whether a later application works, and on what basis, depends on the actual business and the investment plan. It has to be judged case by case.
• Projects that already have a quote but doubt the tier conclusion behind it — a different tier conclusion changes both the fee and the expected benefit considerably, so a second opinion is worth having.
• Companies that already hold a certificate with nobody looking after the obligations — see the fourth section below.

The reverse holds too. Pure trading, pure retail and other activities outside the promotion scope, pure agency arrangements with no physical investment behind them, and projects far below the size thresholds are usually not worth forcing through an application. We say so before the engagement starts rather than taking the sign-now-work-it-out-later business.

02What we actually do

The service covers five things.

• Activity item identification and tier analysis. We map the real business onto the promoted activity items, work out the range of tiers that can be argued for and where additional benefits can stack, and issue a Tier Analysis Memo. We do not predict that you will "definitely get A-something" — the tier is what the review determines against the current promotion list, not something negotiated. What we give you is a target tier and the route to argue for it.
• Line-by-line completion of the application form. Every field across the ten sections, with cross-section reconciliation, plus a list of the data we are missing and need from you. We do not invent numbers on your behalf.
• Chinese-to-English translation of supporting material. Technical agreements, process descriptions, equipment contracts and similar Chinese-language documents are issued as proper English versions and filed with the application.
• Follow-through after submission until the certificate is in hand. Power of attorney, filing, review queries and the interview, responses to requests for correction, the approval notice, acceptance of promotion, collection of the certificate — someone is watching each step, including the ones that simply sit still until somebody pushes them.
• Handover of the post-certificate obligations. We break the certificate into a list with dates and named owners and hand it over — or we keep running it.

03What we need from you

Plainly: what usually holds up a BOI application is not the reviewing side. It is the applicant's own data, signatures and seals. What we mainly need from you is the investment list, the capacity and process description, the basis for the financial projections and the company registration documents, plus the company seal at a few points along the way. We keep a list of who owes what to whom and update the current bottleneck every week, rather than going back to look for the cause after progress has already stalled.

On timing: the authorities set evaluation time limits graded by investment amount, but the real elapsed time from filing to certificate also has to absorb interview scheduling, correction round-trips and the acceptance step. We do not promise a number of days. We work backwards instead — from your target certificate date to the latest acceptable date for each step, so you can see whether you are ahead or behind right now.

04The certificate is not the finish line

The pattern we see is this. The project team disbands once the certificate is in hand, the certificate goes into a filing cabinet, and none of its conditions ever becomes part of anyone's daily job. Two years later the business has shifted and people have moved on, and nobody has gone back to check the operation against the certificate. By the time the annual report raises the question, three or four items of non-compliance have already piled up.

A late or missed report reaches straight into the duty-free import entitlement — goods arrive at port and cannot be released. Continued failure to perform can trigger suspension or withdrawal of the promotion status, and clawback of the tax benefits already taken. That part is retroactive: find it in year three and it is three years of benefit to repay.

So we treat the post-certificate stage as a separate service line, not as a free extra attached to the application. Quarterly and annual reports, reconciling the exemption allowance at both ends, executing the duty-free imports of machinery and raw materials, and the position and work permit deadlines for foreign staff all need watching continuously.

05Why work with us

Every conclusion traces back to the official text, with the date it was retrieved. Our positions come from the current announcements and statutory text of the Board of Investment (BOI), the Revenue Department (RD), the Department of Business Development (DBD) and Thai Customs — not from what is generally assumed to be the case. When a position changes, we tell you which provision changed.

• No unverified numbers. Anything we cannot verify is written as one to confirm against the official source, or given as a range, never pinned down. At the quoting stage this may make us look less obliging than other firms. What it protects is your investment projections.
• We look at your case, not a template. Same industry, different process and investment structure, and the tier conclusion can come out completely differently.
• Our advisers handle the process end to end; you confirm and decide. You never log in to a government system and never have to work through the procedure yourself. Where you have to appear in person or apply a seal, we schedule it in advance and go with you.
• Your data stays inside our own systems, used only by the advisers following your case, and is not passed to any third party.

06What you get

Four deliverables.

• Tier Analysis Memo — activity item identification, the target tier and the route to argue for it, and the list of data still missing.
• The complete set of filled application forms, together with the English versions of the supporting material.
• Progress tracking after submission, and drafted responses to requests for correction.
• A post-certificate obligations list: every condition in the certificate broken out, the deadlines worked backwards, and an owner named against each one.