Last year I blogged about Asia’s final frontier in telecom. This week I had the privilege of visiting Yangon and meeting some of the movers and shakers of the telecom industry in Myanmar. Since last year, the ambitious and recently reformist ASEAN republic has licensed two international operators, Telenor of Norway and Ooredoo of Qatar, to build out mobile networks, as well as entered into agreements with other investors to put money and know-how into developing the industry.
Myanmar is the 73rd country I have worked in, and from what I saw this week, it promises to be one of the most illuminating. The country’s senior policymakers, as a group, are quietly shaping the emergence of an economy which was largely forgotten by the rest of the world until a decade ago, evidently with a sharp appreciation for what needs to be done to keep growth on track. What is Myanmar doing right in telecom, and what can we learn in India from this?
Of course there is perhaps more that Myanmar can learn from India’s experience, too. For starters, India is the one emerging market in telecoms that has seen the most innovation when it comes to marketing - both pricing for services as well as analytics to drive better customer segmentation and targeting. No other country can boast a better handle of micro-segmenting customers and targeting them with offers. And India can claim to be the country that invented “sachet pricing” for telecom, borrowing shampoo pricing techniques to bring the option for consumers to buy their telecoms services in tiny chunks at a time.
Myanmar has probably more to observe in India than vice versa, but it would do no harm for our policy makers to see what’s happening over in Nay Pi Daw from time to time, to remind themselves of the days when life was simple and the plan was clear.
The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.
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