The Future of Sanook: Thailand’s Largest Web Portal

You may not have heard of Sanook, but by internet standards, the company is a grizzled veteran in Thailand, founded by Poramate Minsiri way back in 1998. Over the years it has expanded to offer a number of services and products, including e-commerce, games, news content, advertising, and mobile applications. Today, it is the largest web portal in Thailand.

The company’s e-commerce arm includes Dealfish, a C2C e-commerce marketplace and Sabuy, and B2B2C e-commerce site. This division is led by managing director Tiwa York. The internet portal section and other divisions like mobile, games, and advertising are led by Krittee Manoleehagul, the managing director at Sanook Online Limited.

Part-owned by Tencent and MIH

Sanook started as a Thai-based web directory in 1998 under parent company MWEB. After just a year, MWEB was acquired by MIH Group (under Nasper) (1).

In 1999, the Thai company rebranded fully to Sanook and placed every entity under the single domain of Sanook.com. Back in the 90s, there wasn’t any Thai language portal, and portal sites were really the big thing in the internet business. It took off, and in August 2010, Tencent bought 49.92 percent of Sanook.com. At that time, Sanook.com had about 13 million monthly unique visitors generating 400 million pageviews a month.

Sanook, Mobile, and WeChat

Today Sanook.com boasts a whopping 18.5 million monthly unique visitors generating over 500 million pageviews each month. It has its own editorial team but also syndicates content via other web sources as well.

Krittee says that the top three priorities of his department are WeChat, Sanook.com, and mobile. He estimated that there are about 10 to 15 million smartphone users, about 20 percent of the Thai market, and that number will continue to grow over time. Moving with the mobile trend in Thailand, he says that some of the most popular content on the Sanook portal (like horoscopes, news, and restaurant reviews) are now available on app stores. Krittee adds:

Tiwa and I started looking at certain verticals and said, “Look, this has potential let’s pull it out.” […] Like restaurant reviews, eventually who knows, we might be able to develop it into a business where users can book in advance through the application. [It’s more than just] reviews, you can do more than that.

Tiwa York (Left) and Krittee Manoleehagul (right)

Working with WeChat

The Thai internet giant also runs the mobile messaging app WeChat in Thailand as Sanook is partly owned by Tencent, one of the largest internet companies in China.

E-commerce: Sabuy and Dealfish