Thai industrial developer Amata Corporation says Laos is set to become its “largest focus” in the years ahead, Chief Executive Officer Vikrom Kromadit told Fortune.

“Laos will become our largest focus because of the land bank that they have,” Kromad said. “They also have lots of green energy—that’s why they’re called the battery of Southeast Asia.”

Amata entered Laos in 2022 with Amata City Namor, a 31.5-square-kilometer industrial park situated beside a station on the China-Laos Railway, the line that opened in 2021 to connect Vientiane with Kunming in China’s Yunnan province. The company says its long-term vision for the country could eventually span 200 square kilometers—roughly six times the size of its current Lao park, if fully realized.

The Laos push marks a new chapter for a company that built its fortune in Thailand and Vietnam—and positions Amata to capture Chinese manufacturers relocating production to new hubs across Southeast Asia.

From Thailand to Vietnam

Founded in 1989, Amata developed industrial parks across Thailand’s Rayong and Chon Buri provinces, both part of the country’s Eastern Economic Corridor, and was an early backer of Vietnam, where it opened its first facility in 1994, early in the Southeast Asian country’s Đổi Mới economic reform program, launched in 1986.

Why Laos

Laos, Southeast Asia’s only landlocked country, holds a substantial energy surplus. Its rivers and mountainous terrain supported a government-led push to build hydroelectric dams as a core economic pillar, and the country currently exports about 80% of its electricity to other Asian markets, including Thailand, China, and Singapore.

“They have plenty of land and a lot of water,” Kromadit said, adding that the country has “the best natural conditions” for industrial development. There are caveats: while Laos generates more than 12 gigawatts of capacity from over 80 hydroelectric plants, most cross-border transmission lines bypass local communities, leaving domestic consumers to cope with frequent blackouts. Power reliability is a baseline consideration for manufacturers selecting factory sites, which keeps domestic grid performance on the list of variables for any large industrial project in the country.

Kromadit also sees Laos’s potential as reinforced by China, long the country’s top foreign investor. In 2025, China pumped $18 billion into the Lao economy, primarily directed toward industry, mining, and agriculture, according to the Vientiane Times, a local newspaper.

Laos has been slotted into “China plus one” supply chains, in which Chinese and global manufacturers alike move some—or all—of their production to other countries, both to reduce costs and to avoid tariffs on Chinese-origin products.

“China is the largest manufacturer of all products, so they can’t just keep building only within their country,” Kromadit explained. “They’re also being hit by political pressure from the U.S.”

The Making of an Industrial Park Empire

Kromadit’s path began abroad. After graduating from National Taiwan University with a degree in mechanical engineering, he returned to Thailand in 1975 and founded V&K Enterprise, an import-export business focused on agricultural products, minerals, and seafood. By the 1980s, however, he had grown frustrated with being “just a middleman.”

“I wanted to make more money,” Kromadit said. “When I was in the food business, even though I was the one who created all the channels and brought in business, once companies achieved success, they kicked me out.”

In 1988, he cofounded the Bang Pakong Industrial Estate on the eastern coast of Bangkok, then established Amata Corporation in 1989. The company’s first industrial facility, Amata City Chon Buri, opened the same year.

After visiting Vietnam in 1990, Kromadit decided to make the country Amata’s first overseas market. “I found that the Vietnamese were focused, capable, and smart,” he said. “I thought that Vietnam, in the future, would compete with Thailand for industrial investments.” Amata launched Amata City Bien Hoa in Dong Nai province in 1994.

That prediction has largely come true: Vietnam is now Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economy, with third-quarter GDP growth of 9.95%, and Hanoi aims for the country to reach high-income status by 2045.

Industrial Cities, Not Just Factories

Today, Amata hosts more than 1,500 factories across 12 locations in Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. The company briefly attempted an expansion into Myanmar in 2019, with a facility in Yangon, the country’s commercial center, but those plans were halted in early 2021 following a military coup and the resulting civil war.

Amata positions its facilities as industrial cities that include not just factories but also housing, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls. The company’s flagship Chon Buri campus, for instance, houses the massive 38,000-square-meter Lotus Plus Mall, which features a hypermarket, retail stores, banks, restaurants, and an international cinema. Its facilities also include kindergartens, schools, and technical training institutes, with more on the way. “We’re now looking to build a university,” Kromadit said.

Asked whether Amata might expand into other Southeast Asian markets, such as Indonesia or Cambodia, Kromadit said the company already holds enough land to occupy him for the rest of his life.

“The land that we have on hand is around 700 square kilometers,” he said. “It’s big enough to make me busy until I go to heaven.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.