PACIFIC RIM TRADE : Profiles : For Asian Tycoons, Success Is a Matter of Seizing Initiative : Whether manufacturing toys or exporting rice, these business leaders have prospered by knowing when to make their moves. : PHAIBOON KUONSONGTUM, 47, Thai rice king

By Ken Stier , Special to The Times

June 7, 1994 12 AM PT

Shortly after the start of the Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s, Phaiboon Kuonsongtum found himself in a taxi roaring across the desert from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. One of Thailand’s leading rice traders, Phaiboon opted for the ground transport when commercial flights were grounded by the fighting.

“Business was waiting,” he recalled.

Phaiboon pioneered sales of Thai rice to the Middle East, which now accounts for about 40% of the half a million metric tons that Phaiboon’s firm, the Chaiyaporn Rice Co., exports each year.

Those exports, worth about $100 million, account for about 10% of Thailand’s total annual rice exports, making Phaiboon’s company one of the top traders in a country that has long dominated world rice trade, fighting for first place with the United States in recent years.

Phaiboon’s company, which he owns with his brother and another ethnic Chinese family, is privately held, and profits are kept a closely held secret.

The future for Thai rice is “quite alarming,” Phaiboon said. “The cost of paddy production here is no longer competitive compared with Vietnam or Burma, so the only way for us is to concentrate on higher-quality rice.”

But even this will extend the country’s competitive position for only another five or 10 years. So Phaiboon is already looking to transform his 43,000-square-meter warehouse and private jetty into a consumer goods distribution hub for department stores.

Diversifying from rice is a cautious step for a family that has been in the business for three generations.

Phaiboon’s grandparents were part of the large emigration from the chaotic Chinese mainland in the 1920s. The children were the first in the family to focus exclusively on rice exports, mainly to Hong Kong and Singapore. It was left to Phaiboon and his older brother, who founded their company in 1968, to develop the rest of the world as a market.