By Pacnet Press Release

BANGKOK - Pacnet today affirmed its commitment to invest and grow its Thailand operations as part of the company's strategic plan to focus on high growth emerging markets.

“Thailand is an integral part of our strategy to expand our operations across ASEAN. We remain committed to growing our Thailand operations despite the current tough economic conditions and will continue to target double-digit growth for our operations here this year,” said Bill Barney, Chief Executive Officer of Pacnet.

“We are confident of achieving this target through continued investment in our operations in Thailand, which includes growing our headcount, as well as through expanding our range of global network connectivity solutions offered here with the recent addition of our reseller license,” added Mr Barney.

In April 2009, Pacnet obtained approval for a Type 1 reseller license, enabling the company to offer IP Transit, IP VPN and International Private Line (IPL) services in Thailand, enabling businesses across the country to connect with their partners and offices worldwide.

According to the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) of Thailand, gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of 2009 contracted by 7.1 per cent, the largest quarterly drop since the 1997 financial crisis.

Despite the challenging economic conditions, Thailand's bandwidth consumption continues to grow. TeleGeography has forecast the country's international bandwidth requirements to grow almost tenfold from 43 Gbps in 2008 to 404 Gbps in 2013.

“To meet the huge bandwidth demand, we are also exploring landing EAC-C2C into Thailand, which will provide access to an unprecedented amount of international bandwidth on our next-generation subsea cable network,” said Mr Barney.

“We believe telecommunications is one of the key services that will help businesses back onto the road towards economic recovery,” said Richard Carden, Managing Director of Pacnet Asia. “To help businesses here meet their growing telecommunications needs, we offer a comprehensive set of global and domestic network connectivity solutions under one roof.”

“Additionally, we offer a full suite of managed services such as managed security solutions, that are aimed squarely at helping businesses focus on their core business by managing their network and connectivity requirements, without the need for huge upfront investments which will require them to seek out hard-to-find credit,” added Mr Carden.