ABSTRACT
The automotive industry in Thailand grew rapidly over the two decades to 2012. By 2012, annual production exceeded two million units, becoming the 10th highest in the world.1 The marked success in the expansion of the automotive industry has transformed Thailand into the ‘Detroit of the East’ (Economist Intelligence Unit [EIU], 2008, p.21), with most of the major players in the international automotive industry using the country as a production platform. Nonetheless, insight into the industry’s supply chain is limited. In particular, this inspires the question: does becoming more export-oriented create more or fewer domestic linkages? How have carmakers’ multinational enterprises made use of the growing importance of the product fragmentation phenomenon, i.e. the cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated product processes in the past two decades?
