Revenue is rising across Thailand’s veterinary hospitals while profit falls. The constraint is not demand for pet healthcare. It is the number of hours a veterinarian can work, and where in the country those hours are spent.
Thonglor Pet Hospital, the largest private veterinary hospital operator in Thailand, has grown revenue every year since 2020. Its profit peaked in 2022 and has fallen since.
Accounts filed with Thailand’s Department of Business Development, compiled by Business+, show revenue rising from 812 million baht in 2020 to 1,313 million baht in 2024. Net profit over the same period rose from 85 million to a peak of 134 million, then fell to 83 million.
| Year | Revenue (million baht) | Net profit (million baht) | Net margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 812 | 85 | 10.5% |
| 2021 | 961 | 101 | 10.5% |
| 2022 | 1,143 | 134 | 11.7% |
| 2023 | 1,217 | 113 | 9.3% |
| 2024 | 1,313 | 83 | 6.3% |
Margins are calculated from the published revenue and profit figures. Revenue grew about 15 per cent across 2023 and 2024 together, and net margin fell by almost half over the same two years.
The pattern repeats at smaller operators. BMH, founded in 2021 through the takeover of the Ban Mahachai hospital and now running four branches with a specialism in exotic animals, lifted 2024 revenue 85.4 per cent to 312 million baht and recorded net profit of about 320,000 baht, a margin near 0.1 per cent.
Rattanathibet Pet Hospital, founded in 2015 and now operating eight branches around the clock and taking referrals from other practices, grew revenue 1.3 per cent to 114 million baht while net profit fell 60.1 per cent to 3 million baht.
Three companies do not establish a structural trend. Each operator sits at a different point in its expansion cycle, carrying branch opening costs and one-off expenses that distort a single year.
Demand is not the problem. Thailand recorded about 410,000 births in 2025, the lowest in 76 years, while the number of owned pets rose 6 per cent to 5.38 million and the wider pet business grew 13.2 per cent.
What is driving demand for veterinary care in Thailand?
Falling birth rates and rising pet ownership. Thailand recorded about 410,000 births in 2025, the lowest in 76 years, while owned pets rose 6 per cent to 5.38 million. Veterinary hospital revenue reached about 8.5 billion baht in 2025, up 17 per cent year on year. Demand is also changing type, moving towards chronic disease management and prevention. Financing caps the conversion, because 71 per cent of owners know pet insurance exists and nine per cent hold a policy.
Kasikorn Research Center put veterinary hospital revenue at about 8.5 billion baht in 2025, up 17 per cent on the previous year, and the wider pet market is expected to pass 100 billion baht in 2026.
The next phase of growth does not come from owners spending more on the same treatments. It comes from a shift in the nature of the treatment itself, away from episodic care after an animal falls ill and towards continuous care built around prevention and quality of life.
The global market already sits on the other side of that shift. The three largest selling products of Zoetis, the world’s biggest animal health company, account for roughly 40 per cent of its revenue, and all three are either treatments for chronic conditions or preventive products designed for continuous use.
Thailand is at the start of the same transition. An executive at one of the country’s leading hospital groups puts the proportion of owners who present only after symptoms have become severe at about 70 per cent.
Between the willingness to treat and the ability to pay sits financing, and in Thailand that valve is almost closed. Research from the College of Management at Mahidol University, presented in 2025, found that 71 per cent of Thai pet owners know pet insurance exists while nine per cent hold a policy. The survey covered 357 respondents and was weighted towards urban consumers.
Veterinarians deal with the consequence in the consulting room, where owners reduce or abandon treatment after seeing the estimate. Pet insurance in Thailand is not a product category waiting to be sold. It is missing financial infrastructure for the whole animal health system.
Why can veterinary hospitals not scale as fast as pet spending?
Veterinary hospitals carry heavy fixed costs and a hard limit on throughput. A veterinarian handles roughly one to five cases an hour, against 10 to 15 patients an hour for a doctor in a busy public outpatient department. Animals cannot report their own symptoms, so every consultation runs through the owner and takes longer. Expensive equipment produces revenue only when a trained team is free to use it, which makes clinical hours the binding constraint on growth.
The number of animals a system can treat depends on three things at once. How many clinicians it has, where those clinicians are and at what hours, and how much clinical output a team produces from a given amount of time. Adding to the first without addressing the other two produces very little.
Digital radiography, ultrasound, blood analysers, intensive care units, operating theatres and, at referral level, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging all sit on the fixed cost line. High fixed costs are not a problem in themselves, and hotels and airlines carry them successfully.
The problem arises when the use of those assets depends on the slowest resource to expand, which is the time of the clinical team. A scanner with nobody available to interpret the images is not an asset waiting to produce revenue. It is capital parked inside a building.
Throughput in veterinary medicine is structurally lower than in human medicine. One experienced practitioner estimates that doctors in a busy public outpatient department see roughly 10 to 15 patients an hour, against one to five cases an hour for a veterinarian.
Those figures are professional estimates rather than national statistics, and they say nothing about relative quality. They describe a constraint. An animal cannot report its own symptoms, so the history comes through the owner. The team restrains the animal, manages its behaviour and in many cases sedates it. Examination technique changes with species, size and temperament.
The veterinarian then explains options, costs and uncertainty to an owner who makes the final decision. Almost none of that compresses without a loss of safety or quality.
Some of the work separates cleanly from the veterinarian. Administration, follow-up communication, basic owner education and parts of preventive care release clinical hours when they are delegated.
Other work does not separate at all, because restraint, patient preparation, imaging support, anaesthetic monitoring and theatre assistance require the veterinarian to remain in the room. Support staff raise the output of the team rather than substituting for the clinician one for one.
The ceiling on that delegation in Thailand is set by law and professional regulation as much as by economics. Those boundaries need verification before any operator builds a staffing model on them.
How many veterinarians does Thailand actually have in clinical practice?
Thailand’s veterinary register counts licences rather than clinical hours, which flatters the real position. A 2018 workforce study found that only 1.88 per cent of graduates left animal work entirely, which reads as near total retention. Veterinarians who move into pet food, pharmaceuticals, technical sales or regulatory affairs still count as veterinarians while treating no patients. The number of licences rises while the hours available for treatment stay flat.
Thailand has a genuine shortage of veterinarians by headcount. The 2018 workforce study concluded that demand exceeded supply across both livestock and companion animal practice, and nothing since has reversed that finding. The register, however, hides a second shortage underneath the first.
That study examined employment outcomes within one year of graduation for students from six institutions between 2009 and 2013. Of 1,809 graduates whose employment the researchers were able to classify, 34, or 1.88 per cent, took jobs unrelated to animals.
Applied to an estimated annual net increase of 431 registered veterinarians, the model placed about eight people a year in the category of loss. From the profession’s point of view that is close to full retention.
From the examination room it answers the wrong question entirely. A veterinarian who moves into pet food, animal pharmaceuticals, technical sales or regulatory affairs has not left the profession, and continues to count as one veterinarian in the register while contributing nothing to the treatment rota.
The measure that matters counts hours rather than licences. The standard workforce unit, the full-time equivalent, divides total clinical hours worked by the hours of one full-time clinical post.
A veterinarian treating patients five days a week counts as one. A veterinarian working three days for a company and two in practice counts as roughly 0.4, and both appear identically in the registry. Conventional workforce planning does not capture the difference.
Why the numbers 431, 215 and 453 cannot be subtracted from one another
The same study contains three numbers that invite an arithmetic the data does not support.
The figure of 431 a year is the historical trend in the net increase of registered first-class practitioners. On that basis the study projected the workforce rising from 7,554 in 2014 to 12,297 in 2025, which is a forecast made in 2018 rather than an observed count.
The figure of 215 a year comes from applying the 49.86 per cent share of graduates who entered hospitals and clinics between 2009 and 2013 to that net increase.
The figure of 453 a year reflects growth in membership of the Veterinary Practitioner Association of Thailand, used as a proxy for demand, over a five year series whose slope was lifted by two unusually strong final years. A single member also works in livestock, government or research.
Subtracting 215 from 453 to announce a shortage of exactly 238 clinical veterinarians a year produces tidy arithmetic and bad labour economics. The datasets cover different periods and different definitions.
The honest conclusion is narrower. Companion animal medicine has been taking a growing share of veterinary labour, and the evidence does not tell us how many new clinical posts that share represents.
Those datasets also predate the expansion of the hospital chains, the rise of chronic disease management and specialist referral, and the visible recruitment of veterinary graduates by pet food, pharmaceutical and animal health technology companies. The forecast of 12,297 is a benchmark to test the old model against, not evidence that the country now has enough clinicians.
Why do veterinary graduates in Thailand leave clinical practice?
Corporate employers pay more and offer better conditions. A farm veterinarian post at Central Food Products advertised 35,000 to 50,000 baht a month and accepted new graduates, against practitioner estimates of 25,000 to 40,000 baht for clinical roles. Corporate vacancies appear on public job platforms with salary bands, while clinical vacancies travel through private networks. Long hours compound the gap, with 58 per cent of Thai veterinarians working at least 50 hours a week.
Veterinary graduates are not choosing between one animal hospital and another. Thai Union, whose pet care business runs through its i-Tail subsidiary, has recruited candidates with veterinary backgrounds into project management roles in its pet food business, and food producers advertise farm roles openly to new graduates.
Those are individual postings and professional estimates rather than a national wage survey. Part of the premium in farm roles compensates for provincial placement, travel, fieldwork and on-call duties rather than pure scarcity.
Corporate employers still offer predictable hours, formal benefits and a documented career path that most clinics do not match.
Visibility compounds the difference. A corporate vacancy appears on a recruitment platform with a title, a scope of responsibility, a location and often a salary band.
A clinical vacancy travels through alumni networks, professional associations and closed online groups, and frequently reads in full as a request to send a message. As younger workers move their job search onto digital platforms, that asymmetry stops being a communications problem and becomes one of the mechanisms allocating veterinary labour.
Clinical work has historically paid part of its wage in meaning, through autonomy, case variety and direct relationships with animals and owners. Working conditions are eroding that premium.
Data from Going Beyond, the veterinary workforce whitepaper published by Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health, records 58 per cent of Thai veterinarians working at least 50 hours a week, and 74 per cent reporting problems caused by clients who do not understand the cost of veterinary care.
The study was produced with the consultancy TAGR and surveyed 335 veterinarians and veterinary staff across Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. The Thai subsample is not broken out publicly, so the figures carry direction rather than precision.
The direction is clear enough. Long hours and disputes over money are retention problems, and hospitals lose clinical hours to employers who never poach anybody.
Why does Chiang Mai have clinics but few specialist veterinary centres?
Primary care clinics expand with capital and open within months. Referral centres expand with specialist training and take years to build. Kasikorn Research Center counted 49 new veterinary facilities in the first five months of 2025, almost all at the base of the system. Specialists follow equipment, professional peers and case volume into Bangkok, so provincial cities including Chiang Mai gain clinics faster than they gain emergency and specialist capacity.
Veterinary provision is not a flat market where one provider substitutes for another. A clinic offering vaccination and routine treatment adds a different kind of capacity from a 24 hour hospital with theatres, anaesthesia teams and specialists accepting referrals.
The functional tiers run from primary care clinics through general hospitals and 24 hour emergency hospitals to referral and specialist centres. Each tier faces a different constraint.
The base expands with capital. Premises, basic equipment and a small number of general practitioners assemble within months, which is what the 49 new facilities opened in early 2025 mostly represent.
The top expands with time. Financing buys a scanner, and no amount of financing produces the team that knows when to use it, anaesthetises the patient safely, reads the images, connects the findings to a treatment plan and remains available at three in the morning.
Overnight emergency cover resists expansion not because nobody will pay for it, but because one veterinarian cannot cover two overnight shifts at two hospitals.
Demand is climbing towards the tier that takes longest to build. As the objective of care moves from survival towards quality of life, owners ask for advanced diagnostics, chronic disease management, complex surgery, specialist opinion and emergency access at any hour.
Thonglor operates specialist centres in cardiology, ophthalmology, neurology and spinal care, imaging and emergency medicine. It has simultaneously expanded downwards through a general practice clinic at Thammasat University’s Rangsit campus serving Pathum Thani and northern Bangkok, and its 21 branches now reach Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Rayong, Phuket and Vietnam.
The strategy of one company is not an industry census. It reveals the working assumption of the market leader: a referral centre without a network of clinics feeding and following up its cases uses its most expensive hours badly.
Geography then does its own work. Advanced investment concentrates where household purchasing power, customer density and case volume support it. Specialists follow the equipment, the peers and the training, which draws more referrals, which makes further investment in the same location more economical.
The centre strengthens and the periphery falls further behind. That gravity operates in every market with a dominant capital city, and Chiang Mai sits on the wrong side of it.
The United States still designates veterinary shortage areas and pays loan repayment incentives for practice in them, despite a far larger market and deeper training infrastructure. Those programmes concentrate on food animal medicine rather than companion animals, so the comparison is directional rather than direct. It establishes the general point. Raising the national headcount does not distribute clinicians according to need.
The data Thailand does not collect
Nobody can currently measure the size of that gap. Licensing documents from the Department of Livestock Development classify facilities partly by their ability to admit animals overnight, which regulates premises adequately and says nothing about clinical function.
The registry does not record which hospitals accept emergencies after midnight, which hold a complete surgical team on duty, which employ a cardiologist or a neurologist, and which receive referrals from other clinics.
The question needs four datasets: facilities classified by clinical capability, opening hours and emergency readiness, specialists by discipline and province, and referral volumes with waiting times.
None of them are connected in a national public system, so the country can see where veterinary locations are and not what they are able to treat. Business directories such as Golden Pages record presence and category at provincial level, and the clinical capability layer sits with nobody at all.
[EDITOR NOTE, not for publication: the strongest available upgrade to this section is a count of veterinary facilities in Chiang Mai province from the Golden Pages directory, split by those advertising 24 hour cover and those advertising any named specialism. A single verified local ratio against Bangkok would turn this section from reasoning into evidence.]
Why does veterinary care in Thailand feel expensive?
Thai consumers price veterinary care against human healthcare, which is subsidised by universal coverage, the Social Security system and public sector medical benefits. Veterinary hospitals have no second payer standing behind the owner, so staff, equipment, drugs, rent and overnight operation are carried almost entirely by the customer. Veterinary care is not unusually expensive. The reference price sitting in the consumer’s mind is unusually low, and it operates as a ceiling on fees.
That perception holds prices down while costs continue to rise underneath them. Bills running into tens or hundreds of thousands of baht are real financial shocks in a market where almost nobody holds insurance, and owners respond by delaying, reducing or declining treatment.
Hospitals therefore absorb increases in labour cost, equipment and clinical standards rather than passing them through in full.
Pricing power is not uniform across the tiers. An owner whose animal has been hit by a car or has stopped breathing does not compare quotations, and demand for emergency care is correspondingly less sensitive to price.
Specialist services behave similarly where few providers hold the equipment and the team, because the alternative to the treatment on offer is no treatment.
Routine consultations, dental work, elective procedures and preventive care sit at the other end, where owners compare, postpone and switch. That difference explains the investment in specialist centres and emergency capacity better than revenue per case does.
Where prices cannot rise and buyers cannot assess quality, competition moves into the parts of the service the customer cannot see. An owner sees the quoted surgical price immediately and does not see the components behind it, which include the presence of a dedicated anaesthesia clinician, continuous monitoring of vital signs, the choice of drugs, theatre standards and the intensity of post-operative observation.
A case shared publicly by a practising veterinarian describes exactly that discovery after the fact. One case does not establish that lower priced providers deliver lower standards across the market, and it does identify the structural risk.
A crowded base of the system, price sensitive owners and invisible quality components produce several quality tiers operating under labels that look identical to the customer. That is the clearest argument for a registry that records clinical capability rather than premises.
Who captures the profit from Thailand’s pet boom?
Manufacturers capture the largest share. A patent, a manufacturing process and a brand are created once and sold repeatedly, while a hospital sells hours that can only be used once. Zoetis grew profit faster than revenue on multi-year averages to late 2024, at roughly 11.9 per cent against 8.1 per cent, while Thai hospital operators grew revenue in 2024 and lost profit. Specialist veterinarians capture much of the remainder through pay and bargaining power.
If owners are price sensitive enough to cap hospital fees, the pricing power of the companies selling into those hospitals requires explanation. It rests on the structure of the purchase.
Once a veterinarian diagnoses a chronic condition and recommends continuing treatment, the owner’s decision moves from buying a service to continuing a course of medicine. For prescription products the person selecting the product and the person paying for it are different people, which interrupts ordinary consumer price competition.
Some flagship products hold patents or clinically differentiated outcomes that leave the hospital little freedom to decline to stock them. That mechanism does not apply to every animal health product, because distribution channels and regulatory classifications differ product by product and Thai rules need checking drug by drug.
The deeper difference lies in the type of asset each layer owns. An hour of a veterinarian’s time treats one case, and one theatre holds finite capacity, so hospital revenue growth requires more staff, more space or more hours in close to direct proportion.
A molecule, a body of clinical data, a manufacturing process, a regulatory approval and a brand cost heavily to create once and then sell repeatedly. Selling the millionth dose does not require inventing the molecule again.
Zoetis, on multi-year averages available in late 2024, recorded revenue growth of roughly 8.1 per cent against profit growth of about 11.9 per cent. That figure belongs to a global company operating across a portfolio far wider than companion animals and does not compare one for one with a Thai hospital group. As an illustration of the asymmetry it holds.
Veterinarians and hospitals hold the clinical gate, diagnosing the condition, selecting the treatment and explaining the options. They buy from suppliers larger than themselves and sell to customers who postpone treatment, which leaves them with considerable professional authority and much less commercial bargaining power than that authority suggests.
What consolidation is actually for
Consolidation is the response, and it works only when the units genuinely share. Pooled drug volumes and central purchasing change the terms of negotiation with suppliers, shared specialists and equipment raise utilisation, and routing cases to the appropriate level matches clinical hours to the work that needs them.
Ten hospitals that buy separately, schedule separately and each maintain their own specialists are larger on paper and economically identical to 10 clinics standing next to each other. Investors assessing a chain should be reading for shared cost and shared clinical capacity rather than branch count.
The largest groups are also building assets that scale without adding clinical hours at the same rate. Protocols one team writes and hundreds of veterinarians follow, brands that lower the cost of acquiring each customer, data platforms that improve staffing and referral decisions across a network, and purchasing agreements that reduce input costs at every branch at once.
Thonglor has already moved in that direction. Alongside the hospitals it sells pet insurance, runs an own-label product range under the Dr.Choice name and operates an international pet relocation service, all of which earn without consuming a consulting hour.
They are not becoming pharmaceutical companies. They are changing the proportion of the business that depends on selling human hours.
One participant captures value while appearing on nobody’s balance sheet. Specialist skill does not scale, because one hour still treats one case, and it takes years to create and cannot readily be substituted.
When several hospitals need the same cardiologist, neurologist or emergency clinician at once, the bargaining power moves to the person holding the qualification. It arrives as higher pay, shift premiums, choice of employer and the ability to negotiate working conditions.
Some of the money the pet boom created is being captured by individuals in white coats rather than by any of the companies competing for them.
What this means for operators in Chiang Mai
Pet humanisation has already done the easy part of the work by creating the demand. Everything downstream of that is a conversion problem, and the constraints stack.
Financing determines how much affection becomes treatment, and the workforce determines how many people are available to deliver it. Deployment settles the province, the shift and the level of specialisation those people work at, while team productivity settles how much clinical output one of their hours produces.
Provider structure routes the case to the tier that suits it, the consumer reference price caps how much of the cost reaches the owner, and bargaining power decides who keeps what is left at the end.
The market rewards the operator who turns one veterinary hour into more clinical output, one machine into more billable procedures and one baht of capital into more repeatable revenue. It does not reward the operator who opens branches fastest.
In a market where the demand already exists, the profitable position is standing on the bottleneck rather than adding to the queue behind it. That position is open to businesses that are not hospitals at all: anyone who gives veterinarians their hours back, opens the financing valve, connects the missing referral pathways or builds the data layer the country still lacks.
That reading applies well beyond animal health. It is the same test we applied to Chiang Mai’s UNESCO bid and to the city’s technology sector. A rising market rewards whoever owns the scarce input, not whoever arrives first.
This is part one of a CMBN research series on Thailand’s animal health economy. Part two examines the animal pharmaceutical market, where the profits the hospital system cannot hold are ending up.
Sector research of this kind is produced through CMBN Research Services for members and clients. The Chiang Mai service provider guides cover the professional support side of the same market, veterinary businesses and their suppliers are listed in the Golden Pages directory, and city-facing coverage runs on CNX Mag.
