Thai real estate developer Amata Corporation says Laos will become its “largest focus” in the years to come, CEO Vikrom Kromadit tells Fortune.
“Laos will become our largest focus because of the land bank that they have,” Kromadit tells Fortune. “They also have lots of green energy—that’s why they’re called the battery of Southeast Asia.”
Amata expanded into Laos in 2022, starting with “Amata City Namor,” which covers 31.5 square kilometers and sits beside a station on the China-Laos Railway. The company says its long-term Laos vision could reach 200 square kilometers.
Kromadit’s company built its fortunes in Thailand and Vietnam. Amata Corporation, founded in 1989, built industrial parks across Thailand’s Rayong and Chon Buri provinces. It was also an early backer of Vietnam, building its first facility there in 1994, early in the Southeast Asian country’s reform program. Laos, however, offers an opportunity for Amata to capture Chinese manufacturers expanding to new manufacturing hubs in Southeast Asia.
Laos, Southeast Asia’s only landlocked country, boasts a huge energy surplus, as its rivers and mountainous terrain supported a government-led push to build hydroelectric dams as a core economic pillar. The country currently exports about 80% of its electricity to other Asian countries like Thailand, China, and Singapore.
“They have plenty of land and a lot of water,” Kromadit says, adding that it has “the best natural conditions” for industrial development. (While Laos generates over 12 GW of capacity from over 80 hydro plants, most cross-border transmission lines bypass local communities, sticking consumers with frequent blackouts.)
To Kromadit, Laos’s potential is also backed by China, long the country’s top foreign investor. In 2025, China pumped $18 billion into Laos’s economy, primarily toward industry, mining and agriculture, according to the Vientiane Times, a local newspaper.
Laos has been slotted into “China plus one” supply chains, where both Chinese and global manufacturers move some–or all–of their production to other countries, both to reduce cost and avoid tariffs on Chinese-origin products.
“China is the largest manufacturer of all products, so they can’t just keep building only within their country,” Kromadit explains. “They’re also being hit by political pressure from the U.S.”
After graduating from National Taiwan University with a degree in mechanical engineering, he returned to Thailand in 1975 and founded V&K Enterprise, an import-export business that focused on agricultural products, minerals and seafood. But by the 1980s, he was frustrated with being “just a middleman.”
“I wanted to make more money,” Kromadit confesses. “When I was in the food business, even though I was the one who created all the channels and brought in business, once companies achieved success, they kicked me out.”
In 1988, he co-founded the Bang Pakong Industrial Estate on the eastern coast of Bangkok, then established Amata Corporation in 1989 Amata’s first industrial facility, Amata City Chon Buri, opened that same year.
After Kromadit visited Vietnam in 1990, he decided to make the country Amata’s first overseas market. “I found that the Vietnamese were focused, capable and smart,” he says. “I thought that Vietnam, in the future, would compete with Thailand for industrial investments.” Amata launched Amata City Bien Hoa in Dong Nai province in 1994.
His prediction has largely come true: Vietnam is now Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economy, with Q3 GDP growth of 9.95%. Hanoi wants to have Vietnam reach high-income status by 2045.
Amata today hosts more than 1,500 factories in 12 locations across Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. It briefly attempted an expansion into Myanmar in 2019, with a facility in Yangon, the country’s commercial center. Plans were halted in early 2021 following a military coup and resulting civil war.
Amata positions its facilities as industrial cities that include not just factories, but also living facilities like housing, schools, hospitals and shopping malls. The company’s flagship Chon Buri campus, for instance, houses the massive 38,000-square-meter Lotus Plus Mall, which includes a hypermarket, retail stores, banks, restaurants and an international cinema.
The company’s facilities include kindergartens, schools and technical training institutes, with more on the way. “We’re now looking to build a university,” Kromadit says.
Asked whether Amata might expand into other Southeast Asian markets, like Indonesia or Cambodia, Kromadit says the company already has enough land to occupy him for the rest of his life.
“The land that we have on hand is around 700 square kilometers,” he says. “It’s big enough to make me busy until I go to heaven.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com