At the CP Innovation Exposition 2026, Tanit Chearavanont, Chief Commercial Officer of CP Axtra Public Company Limited (SET: CPAXT), laid out a comprehensive narrative of enterprise overhaul, tracing how a 37-year-old Thai wholesale giant remade itself into a technology-driven e-commerce force.
Framing his address around “Transforming Retail and Wholesale: Empowering People and Driving Innovation through Technology,” Mr. Tanit detailed the sector’s migration from legacy physical storefronts to what he described as E-Commerce 2.0, where Thai consumers average three to four hours of daily engagement and demand high speed, personalization, and seamless omni-channel experiences.
Tracing CP Axtra’s evolution since pioneering big-box wholesale at Lat Phrao in 1989, Mr. Tanit highlighted the company’s shift from initial click-and-collect experiments in 2019 to its major digital pivot following the consolidation with Lotus’s and the launch of its dedicated B2B platform, Makro PRO. Operating as a first-party wholesale platform rather than a third-party marketplace intermediary, Makro PRO has achieved rapid scale.
Across the broader enterprise, e-commerce revenue share expanded from 13.6% in 2022 to 34% year-to-date in 2026, touching peak monthly rates of 38%—a dramatic rise from a pre-transformation baseline of roughly 3% that positions Makro PRO as Thailand’s top B2B e-commerce platform.
The impetus for this technical overhaul grew out of operational friction under off-the-shelf software vendors. Mr. Tanit noted that early e-commerce attempts relied on paper printouts, smartphone screenshots for store picking, and unstable software. When a high-profile brand campaign drove daily order volumes from 12 million baht to 20 million baht, the external Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture crashed under the spike. Concluding that the wholesale conglomerate needed full control over its core infrastructure, CP Axtra built its own order management system, using open-source framework components within six months.
That transition fundamentally reshaped the company’s operational throughput. Today, CP Axtra’s proprietary order management system handles daily online sales between 250 million and 300 million baht across 61,000 daily orders, dispatching approximately two million parcel units each day.
Adopting the strategic principle “Build the core, co-create the rest,” CP Axtra reengineered its supply chain network through targeted technical partnerships rather than standard vendor licensing. The company co-developed its warehouse management system with CJ Logistics, deployed transport management tools built alongside Alibaba’s Cainiao, implemented smart store vision systems with Huawei, and integrated Tencent Cloud infrastructure, while retaining direct ownership over core engines for order processing, pricing, and customer loyalty.
To secure its proprietary edge, CP Axtra registered four AI patents covering personalized search reranking via hybrid large language models, specialized Thai-language AI encoding, hybrid lexical-semantic search algorithms, and multi-agent voice-assisted ordering systems.
Looking ahead, Mr. Tanit set out an ambition for CP Axtra to become the leading retail technology company in Southeast Asia. Reflecting on the leadership conviction required to weather initial system failures and organizational doubt, he concluded that technological tools are ultimate enablers, but true enterprise transformation relies on human talent, cultural alignment, and strategic collaboration.
