Siam Cement plans to recruit 200-300 staff next year

Siam Cement Group, Thailand's leading industrial conglomerate, plans to hire 200-300 local staff next year for its new plants and to replace retired employees.

"If we don't recruit any new employees, newly-graduated students may become a burden on society. We also adopted this recruitment policy when we encountered the Tom Yum Kung crisis in 1997," Manoon Sunkuna-korn, SCG's director of corporate human resources, said yesterday.

While the group would continue welcoming new university graduates in the coming year despite the economic turndown, the number would be lower than the recent past. According to its records, it recruited 607 graduates from local universities in 2006 and 871 graduates last year.

Expansion projects will soon be completed and commence operations, such as olefin cracker unit 2 in Rayong and the Kraft paper plant in Vietnam.

Manoon confirmed that group companies had no early-retirement programmes or plans to lay off workers although they were facing many problems in both the domestic and global markets. For joint ventures where SCG is a minority partner, recruitment and early-retirement policies will depend on the executives of those companies.

SCG president and CEO Kan Trakulhoon said last month that the group must be careful in moving forward with investments particularly during the tough economic times. "We will suspend unnecessary projects and give importance to keeping our cash. Meanwhile, we will not overlook the opportunity to invest in existing businesses, which may yield better returns than making our own investments," he said.