Boonsithi Chokwatana is chairman of Saha Group, Thailand's leading consumer products conglomerate. This is part 18 of a 30-part series .

In the 1970s, Thailand's factories were concentrated in Bangkok. Economic growth led companies to expand, but without proper urban planning they just spread without any control. The environment in and around the densely packed factories quickly deteriorated.

In Japan, there are many cases where the head office is in Tokyo, but company factories are in rural areas. When it comes to securing labor, it was obvious that factories needed to be located in rural parts of Thailand, too, I thought. That was also in line with the "emphasis on regional development" that the Thai government included in its third five-year plan beginning in 1971.

I decided to do everything myself, starting with the creation of an industrial park, because I was convinced Japanese manufacturers would accelerate their expansion into Thailand. We had established a holding company to serve as a point of contact for negotiations on joint ventures. In addition to that, if land for the factories was already secured, negotiations would go even quicker.

My father did not object, but he was not fully on board, either. He was worried about the cash flow. At the time, Saha Group was poorly capitalized and relied on bank loans for working capital. I explained to him that we would not invest all at once, but would move forward with the construction gradually, and he gave the project his approval.

The first task was to find a location. We found a potential site in Samut Prakan Province, near the mouth of the Chao Phraya River. The site was just 20 km from Bangkok, but the ground was soft and not suited for industrial use. It was later turned into a shrimp farm.

So instead my closest younger brother, Narong, and I looked at Sriracha, Chonburi Province, about 120 km southeast of Bangkok. Sriracha is where Thailand's largest port, Laem Chabang, will be built. Nowadays the trip takes about an hour and a half by car, but back then there were no highways. I remember it took quite a while, driving on narrow, bumpy roads.

The site was a sugar cane field owned by the government-affiliated Krungthai Bank. There was a port nearby and the ground was solid. It was also at a high elevation, so there was no need to worry about flooding. I thought it was the right place, so I started planning.

Instead of moving entire plants from Bangkok, we decided to increase production capacity in Sriracha. While there were no fears of flooding, there were concerns about the water supply. So we focused on products that do not use much water.

One by one, we built factories for shoe processing, daily necessities, underwear fabrics and instant noodles.

It was difficult to win over the local residents. At that time Sriracha was a quiet farming and fishing village, with only an oil refinery, and they were wary of people from Bangkok like us.

"There will be more places for your children to work when they grow up," we explained to them.

Naturally, it is important not to inconvenience residents with drainage problems or smoke from factories, but we went one step further and made coexistence with the community a top priority. Rather than isolating the site from the surrounding area, we gradually developed parks, markets, schools, and outlet stores for manufactured goods, aiming to create a place for locals to visit. This is why we called it an "industrial park."

The park started at 80 hectares and has since expanded to 288 hectares. More than 60 companies have moved in, 90% of which were from Saha Group. There were many joint ventures with Japanese companies, and about 6,000 Japanese living in Sriracha.

After that, industrial parks sprang up one after another -- in the Prachinburi Province in the east, in Lamphun Province, near the commercial capital Chiang Mai in the north and in Mae Sot in Tak Province along the border with Myanmar.

The basic principle is for group companies to move into the parks, but they also sell plots outside companies.

There are many conglomerates in Thailand, but other than the dedicated companies that run the industrial parks, Saha Group is the only one that operates its own industrial parks.

This column is part of The Nikkei's "My Personal History" ("Watashi no Rirekisho") series of autobiographies. The series first appeared in The Nikkei in 1956. Since then, a wide variety of world-changing individuals have written or dictated their life stories for publication.