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Continued from Sayo Laos Magazine

Question: Do you need a lot of capital investment in television production?

We are living in the digital world therefore we must be able to follow the new trends and when there is a new program we often times have to spend a lot of money, very much like Thailand and it also depends on who is the supporter at the time, when we signed the contract with the Lao government we have a budget of 2.5 million US dollars.

Question: Do you have enough skills and resources to do your job?

Yes, we have many that graduated from overseas, such as from Australia, and America; we’ve a lot of financial assistance but like everything else, there is no guaranteed, and it could change at any given time. As of right now, we could be doing it this way, or changing to something that’s completely different, therefore we constantly have to learn new things. We do our marketing in Bangkok, which we have someone there to help us.

Question: How many hours are you on air?

From 16 hours to 20 hours, but approximately 12 hours is considered great, we wrote the program for it already.

Question: There are approximately 6 million populations in Laos, how many television sets are there in all?

I can’t remember the exact number but we’ve a survey that estimated the actual number of household that would be able to receive the signal, how many television sets per household, but the actual marketing survey came from Thailand because we don’t have enough resource.

Question: What are some of the problems that you’ve encountered while making ‘Sayo Laos’ magazine?

There are some problems on a day-to-day basis, no matter what you do in life, you’ll always encounter some problems, and it’s up to you to handle that problem. But I want to stress again that we don’t have any problem with the government, they actually help us on a periodically basis. As of right now, ‘Sayo Laos’ magazine is mailed to 27 locations of the Laos Ambassador’s office across the world and I don’t have to pay for the shipping and handling cost. In the course of conducting our business, we are like the children where we’ve one father, and we’ve the Thai government as our godmother, this is the main goal for most of us that grow up in today society.

Question: Who is MTV target audience?

We are living in the digital world, and it is impossible to prevent people from watching MTV, but our strongest competitor is the Thai TV because they’ve been around a lot longer and are more experienced. They’re up to date with their technology, they’ve a good reception and signal strength; even though we’ve helped from the government but it’s not as easy as it appears.

When I was 21 years old, I was in charged of running factory-clothing apparel, which has about 500 employees. There were many problems that I faced and I asked myself then if it was the best that I could do at the time, and sometimes problem resolves itself in given time, but if we face a problem and feel discourage, then I think we’re tested by the lord, we can’t just throw our hands up in the air and give up, we’ve to move forward.

Question: Does advertising revenue cover ‘Sayo Laos’ magazine cost?

Is everything good? The answer is no, we’ve been doing it for 3 years now, and things take time. Lao society is going through a transformation, there is a lot of competition, and we’ve increasing number of foreign investors and every new products need introduction to the local markets, which we play a major role in helping them to become successful. Then we’ve to ask ourselves, can we survive by doing this? We’ve to examine ourselves, if you think we’re rich because of the income from the magazine, this is not true, I’m a bit better than an average person living in Laos that I have a car, I have a house, but I’ve invested a lot of time and money just like everyone else.

Question: Is there any International magazine in Laos? For example buying the brand name of certain well know magazine and publish in Lao language.

No we don’t have anything like that, but I’m not worry because no matter what kind of magazines out there, if written in Lao, people will read and this will help our younger readers to be able to pronounce and read Lao correctly because our language is a mixed language, just like why am I able to speak Thai clearly even though I’ve never learned the Thai language, it’s because I learned from Thai television, and the mixed language (pasa ga jai) is when we speak half Lao and half Thai, but cannot speak any language clearly or properly, and we’ve the tendency to combine the two languages together as one.

To be continued, Muslims of Vientiane