BOI promotion is the cleanest route to full foreign ownership — provided your activity, capital and reporting can carry the conditions attached to it.

The Board of Investment publishes activity groups rather than industries, and the classification your project falls into determines everything that follows: the tax holiday length, the minimum investment, the technology or skill conditions and the reporting burden. Two software companies with similar revenue can land in different groups because one develops its own platform while the other resells and configures somebody else's. Getting the classification right at the start is the single highest-value decision in the whole application.

We begin by writing the project description the way the committee reads it — what is produced, what value is added inside Thailand, what proportion of staff are skilled, what equipment is imported and what the three-year revenue path looks like. If the honest description does not fit a promoted activity, we say so early rather than filing an application that will absorb three months and be refused.

Activities that commonly succeed include software and digital services, manufacturing with genuine local value added, regional headquarters and trading support functions, research and development, logistics and warehousing with technology content, and some healthcare, education and hospitality projects with specific investment thresholds.

Corporate income tax exemption applies to income from the promoted activity only. That distinction sounds procedural until the first audit, when the Revenue Department asks the company to separate promoted income from non-promoted income across shared staff, shared premises and shared overheads. A promoted company therefore needs a chart of accounts designed on day one to keep the two streams apart, and an allocation policy that an auditor will accept. This is where most promoted companies lose money they were entitled to keep.

Duty relief on machinery and raw materials is granted against a specific list, and imports outside that list attract full duty. The privilege runs on deadlines: the machinery import period, the operation start date and the reporting cycle are all fixed in the certificate, and extensions must be requested before expiry rather than explained afterwards.

Ownership, land and immigration privileges arrive with the promotion certificate. Full foreign shareholding becomes lawful for the promoted activity, the company may hold land for the promoted project, and visas and work permits for skilled foreign staff are processed through the One Start One Stop Investment Center, which is materially faster than the ordinary labour office route provided the skill and salary conditions in the certificate are met.

Promotion is not a certificate you frame. It is a set of yearly obligations: reporting operating results, evidencing the investment actually made, evidencing the skilled headcount, keeping the promoted and non-promoted books separate, and filing corporate income tax returns that claim the exemption correctly with the supporting schedules attached. Missing an annual report is not a formality; it is the usual first step towards a privilege being suspended.

Because our office holds both the legal file and the accounting file, the annual BOI report and the audited financial statements are prepared from the same underlying records. That removes the most common finding in BOI reviews, which is a report that does not agree with the audited numbers.

For companies that already hold promotion and are unsure whether their bookkeeping supports it, we run a focused review: a sample of promoted and non-promoted revenue, the allocation of shared costs, the machinery list against actual imports, and the skilled staff records against the certificate conditions. Where there are gaps we correct them before an auditor or the Revenue Department finds them.