Nalaanlat Nunnonl, chief marketing officer, said the company’s vision was now to become one of the leading players for beauty products in Asean by 2020.
The company next month will launch its own house brands – Clouda for makeup and Keira for skincare – with about 100 products altogether.
The ranges will be distributed via a number of channels, both online and offline.
“We will next year explore selling our house-brand cosmetics beyond Thailand, primarily to the CLMV markets [Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam]. We will appoint local distributors in each of those territories. Under the 2020 vision, we will shift the way we do business from business-to-consumer to be more business-to-business,” she said.
“We want to stand behind the beauty of women in Asean. Our house-brand cosmetics will be distributed to all potential markets throughout the region.”
MPG wants to grow its annual revenue from around Bt400 million posted last year to about Bt5 billion in 2020, of which 80 per cent will be contributed by its own house-brand beauty products and the rest from its existing retail businesses.
The revenue contribution from overseas markets will be about 40 per cent by 2020, Nalaanlat said.
The business revamp is in line with the arrival of digital technology, which allows individuals to download and enjoy movies and music in front of a computer screen, she explained. Digital tech had affected traditional retailers of home-entertainment products, including Mangpong, which were burdened with huge stocks of music and movies as a result.
Mangpong is among the longest-established entertainment retailers in Thailand, merchandising a wide range of products, including Blu-ray discs, DVDs, compact discs, vinyl records and other formats.
Mangpong was established by Montri Mitsatha and Kityajai Triekvijit, who were both initially movie and music enthusiasts rather than businesspeople.
They opened their first store as a small movie and music retailer in 1981, before developing the business into Mangpong, a full-size retailer, in 1989.
The first Mangpong shop was located at The Mall Ratchaprasong, offering movies and music in the form of laser disc, VHS and cassette tape, as well as other entertainment-related products such as movie posters and T-shirts. Nalaanlat, a second-generation member of the Nunnonl family, said Mangpong had spent the years through to 1994 as the “beginning-to-stand era” for a business that was raised via her parents’ love for home-entertainment products. At that time, cassette recordings of Harajuku music became the most popular products sold by the company.
From 1995 to 2006, the company entered the “growing era” by acquiring the rights for blockbuster movies, such as “The Terminator” and “Lord of the Rings”, and retailing them as home-entertainment products.
Mangpong was a pioneering business in terms of bringing licensed Hollywood blockbusters into Thai homes, she said.
“In 2000, which was the peak year for Mangpong, the company operated about 300 Mangpong outlets, of which 200 were kiosks and the remainder were shops. The number of movie titles stocked in our library was as high as 100,000 at the time,” the chief marketing officer said.
The company then entered an “adjustment period” between 2007 and 2012, shaped by the transformation of media technology from cassette tape to digital format, which allowed movies on Blu-ray discs and DVDs to spread easily via a large number of players in the market.
“At that time, we adjusted ourselves by bringing in documentaries and edutainment content created by the BBC, such as ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘Blue Planet’, to sell exclusively at our Mangpong stores, in order to offer different products to the market,” Nalaanlat said.
However, with the rapid development of the Internet and digital technology in recent years, today’s consumers can download and enjoy movies at home, she added.
“We have gradually reduced the number of Mangpong stores to about 24 today. The number of movie titles in our library has also declined gradually, to between 3,000 and 4,000,” she said.
Diversifying risk
In a move aimed at diversifying its business risk, MPG launched the Gizman chain in 2013 as a “house of lifestyle gadgets”. The flagship Gizman store was opened at the company’s headquarters on Lat Phrao Road Soi 90, while the first official outlet was opened at CentralPlaza Rama 3.
MPG now operates a chain of 30 Gizman stores.Inspired by Nalaanlat and her mother, MPG last year launched Stardust, a chain of multi-brand beauty stores, with its first outlet at Future Park Rangsit.
There are now seven stores in the Stardust chain. “We will this year convert full or partial space in 10 to 15 of our Mangpong stores to Stardust. We expect that by 2020, there will be about five Mangpong stores left in the marketplace, located only at prime locations in Bangkok,” MPG’s marketing chief said.