54 | FORBES INDONESIA JULY 2019
P
etch Osathanugrah is a walking, talking adver-
tisement for M-150, the energy drink his fam-
ily’s company Osotspa sells and that is No. 1
in Thailand by sales. At 64, there seems little
Petch hasn’t already done: A once chart-topping rocker,
occasional film actor and advertising executive, Petch re-
mains a fixture in Bangkok’s live-music scene, a univer-
sity president and—if that wasn’t enough—a major arts
patron, with a collection so vast he claims to have lost
count, but that includes works by Picasso and Damien
Hirst. Oh, he’s building a museum, too.
As Osotspa’s dynamo CEO, however, Petch is tackling
a different challenge: that few outside Thailand have ever
heard of, much less tried, M-150 or Osotspa’s other prod-
ucts. Petch aims to change that by ramping up Osotspa’s
footprint abroad, starting in neighboring markets such as
Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. In the process, he’s trans-
forming one of Thailand’s oldest companies from a family-
run pharmaceutical firm into a modern consumer-prod-
ucts multinational. “This is my vision,” says Petch, “to go
from one of the oldest companies in Thailand and trans-
form it into one of the most modern.”
Last October, Petch led 128-year-old Osotspa in the
country’s biggest IPO of the year, raising a $464 millionwar chest for expansion by selling a roughly 20% stake
that valued the company at $2.3 billion. Osotspa’s stock
has since gained a quarter in value, boosting the Osath-
anugrah family’s 64% holding to roughly $1.9 billion,
pushing its overall net worth up by 30% from the year
before and vaulting it up four places to eighth on our an-
nual list of Thailand’s richest.
The path to market was anything but easy. After tak-
ing the reins of Osotspa in 2015, Petch led a sweeping re-
organization that trimmed Osotspa’s exceedingly diverse
line of health items and pharmaceuticals, refocusing on
energy drinks such as M-150. He also laid off a quarter of
Osotspa’s employees and recruited experienced profes-
sional managers from international firms such as Unile-
ver. “I didn’t want the company to be a family business,”
Petch says during an interview in his high-rise office
at Osotspa’s sprawling headquarters. Since the family
bought the site in 1995 on what was then the city’s out-
skirts, bustling Bangkok has engulfed it. “I wanted it to
be more professional, more organized.”
Petch’s great-grandparents started what would be-
come Osotspa in 1891. Chinese immigrants, they opened
the Teck Heng Yoo pharmacy in Bangkok’s Chinatown
selling traditional herbal remedies. After one of their