BOI's May 2025 Strategic Investment Package Signals a More Selective Approach to Promotion

Thailand's Board of Investment approved a package of investment promotion measures on May 19, 2025, aimed at strengthening the competitiveness of Thai business, including small and medium enterprises. The package does two distinct things at once: it revises the criteria for promoting data center, cloud, and data-hosting projects, and it deliberately discontinues promotion for a specific set of activities the BOI judges to be at risk of market oversupply or exposed to U.S. trade measures, including solar cells and panels, certain vehicle parts, and steel products. Neither change targets pharmaceutical, medical device, or cannabis manufacturing directly, but the package is a useful, concrete data point on how selective Thailand's BOI has become about what it will and will not promote, and that lesson applies directly to any foreign investor structuring a BOI-promoted regulated manufacturing project.

What the Package Actually Contains

The data center and cloud revision raises the bar for what qualifies for BOI promotion in that sector. Rather than promoting data center or hosting capacity as a category on its own, the revised criteria prioritize projects that demonstrate advanced-computing efficiency and a genuine workforce-development plan, meaning an applicant now has to show more than capital and floor space to qualify. This is a meaningful shift in framing: it rewards a project's technical sophistication and its commitment to building local skilled capacity, not simply its scale.

The second half of the package runs in the opposite direction. The BOI deliberately discontinued promotion for activities it judges to be at risk of market oversupply, or directly exposed to U.S. trade measures, naming solar cells and panels, certain vehicle parts, and steel products specifically. These are sectors where Thailand had, in some cases, actively courted investment in prior years; withdrawing promotion from them is a explicit signal that the BOI is willing to narrow its own priority list in response to global market and geopolitical conditions, rather than promoting a broad, static list of favored industries indefinitely.

The FDI Numbers Behind the Decision

The package landed against a backdrop of strong foreign investment momentum into Thailand. Foreign direct investment for the period January through November 2025 reached THB 311.16 billion, an increase of 45% year-on-year. That period saw 973 approved foreign companies, creating 5,718 Thai jobs. BOI-promoted projects accounted for approximately 74.7% of total investment value across the same period, meaning the large majority of foreign capital flowing into Thailand during this window came through projects that had secured BOI promotion rather than operating entirely outside that system. Read together, these figures show a BOI operating from a position of strength, not one trying to attract investment at any cost: promotion volume and quality both matter to an agency seeing this level of foreign capital inflow already.

The SME Angle Alongside the Sector Recalibration

The package's stated aim, strengthening the competitiveness of Thai business including small and medium enterprises, is worth separating from the two headline changes above, because it points to a third dimension of the same policy. Thailand's SME sector has historically had limited direct interaction with BOI promotion, which has tended to concentrate on larger foreign-capital projects capable of meeting BOI's minimum investment thresholds and reporting obligations. A package that explicitly names SME competitiveness as a goal, in the same announcement that tightens data center criteria and drops underperforming sectors, signals that the BOI is thinking about promotion as a tool for building a broader base of internationally competitive Thai businesses, not solely as a mechanism for attracting the largest available foreign manufacturing projects. For a foreign investor partnering with, acquiring, or supplying a Thai SME as part of a broader Thailand market-entry strategy, this is a reason to ask whether that Thai partner's own operations could qualify for a BOI promotion category being actively expanded, rather than assuming BOI promotion is only relevant to the foreign investor's own directly held entity.

Reading the FDI Numbers Correctly

The 45% year-on-year increase in FDI value for the January-November 2025 period is a large enough jump that it is worth being precise about what it does and does not show. It confirms that Thailand's overall investment climate was attracting substantially more foreign capital across 2025 than in the prior comparable period, and that the 973 approved foreign companies generating 5,718 Thai jobs represent real, executed investment activity rather than announced-but-unrealized pledges. It does not, on its own, tell a foreign investor evaluating a specific pharmaceutical, medical device, or cannabis-adjacent project whether that project's own sector is part of the growth or a smaller share of it; the public figures available describe the aggregate and the 74.7% BOI-promoted share, not a sector-by-sector breakdown. The right use of this data point for a DeeMED client is as context, evidence that Thailand's BOI is operating amid strong overall demand for its promotion certificates, which is itself part of why the May 2025 package narrows criteria in some areas rather than loosening them everywhere: an agency fielding this much application volume has more room to be selective about which projects it promotes.

The Honest Read for a Pharma, Device, or Cannabis Investor

This particular package is not aimed at Thailand's life-sciences or regulated-substance sectors, and a foreign investor structuring a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, a medical device production line, or a cannabis-adjacent processing operation should not read the data center criteria or the discontinued-sector list as directly applicable to their own project. What the package does demonstrate, credibly and concretely, is the philosophy the BOI is now applying across its promotion decisions generally: reward genuine technical substance and workforce commitment, and actively withdraw promotion from sectors that no longer serve Thailand's competitive position, rather than treating any qualifying application as an automatic approval.

That philosophy carries a direct lesson for a foreign investor building a BOI-promoted pharmaceutical or medical device manufacturing project in Thailand. BOI promotion for qualifying pharmaceutical and medical device activities remains available and commonly used, including for full foreign ownership under Section 12 of the Investment Promotion Act, but the same selectivity on display in the May 2025 package should be expected in how those applications are evaluated. An application built around genuine technology transfer, a real workforce-development commitment, and a long-term competitiveness case for Thailand, rather than one built solely around capital deployment and production volume, is the kind of application this BOI is now visibly rewarding. A foreign investor treating BOI promotion as a formality to be checked off, rather than a case to be built with the same substance the data center revision now demands of that sector, is underestimating how the criteria across BOI's promotion decisions have shifted.

What This Means for Planning a BOI Application

A foreign investor evaluating BOI promotion for a regulated manufacturing project, whether pharmaceutical, medical device, or another life-sciences category, should build the application around the same substance this package rewards elsewhere: a credible technology or process advantage, a genuine plan for developing Thai workforce skills tied to the project, and a case for why the investment strengthens Thailand's long-term competitive position rather than simply adding capacity in a sector already well served. Structuring that case correctly from the outset, alongside the underlying Thai entity that will hold the BOI promotion certificate and any accompanying Thai FDA or DTAM regulatory license, is core to how DeeMED supports foreign investors forming a Thailand entity for a BOI-promoted, Thai FDA, or DTAM-licensed operation.