Guided tour of RONDA plant closed to Bangkok on 12 June 2018

Guided tour of RONDA plant closed to Bangkok on 12 June 2018
The members of the Swiss Society Bangkok and the Swiss Thai Chamber of Commerce used the opportunity to see Swiss standards of precision in a Thai plant.
Khun Kanchit Satarug, Managing Director, informed the visitors about the organization and the products made by RONDA.
Mechanical and electronic components are manufactured by RONDA Thailand and assembled to complete movements that are then shipped to Hong Kong for worldwide distribution to customers.
Besides simple parts, RONDA Thailand is producing several very complex parts for watches, including stop watch function, dual day, week and month indication, etc. These parts are sold to many famous watchmaking brands around the world. 
The tour around the plant was made in three groups; Peter Schuepbach, Senior Technical Department Manager, guided his group in English, Michael Seinige, Senior Department Manager, took the German speaking group and Khun Khanchai took the 3rd group in Thai language and showed them several departments of the big three-story building. Mr. Schuepbach and Mr. Seinige, both of them Swiss nationality, work at RONDA Thailand for more than 20 years. 
Very impressing was one big production hall where around 270 persons (most of them women) were working. To my surprise they didn’t use any special glasses or microscopes and they managed to assembly by hand very small components in an atmosphere of high concentration and silence. 
Unusual in Europa but very common in Thailand are the extensive social benefits RONDA offers to their 750 employees in this plant. Besides the salary, the insurance and the pension scheme, the staff is offered subsidise canteen food, free working uniform and free shuttle transport to the company and back home. 
Further information is available on www.ronda.ch