Page 63 - myanmar

Myanmar is emerging as one of the world’s first smartphone-only mobile markets. And this development is helping the country make other leaps in market development.
So few people have been able to buy a mobile phone at all until recently, that years of pent-up demand have resulted in a ready market for smartphones that have come down significantly in price.
The cost of a SIM card has dropped from several thousand dollars to just $1.50, and with three networks now vying for custom, packages are competitive and the take-up rate is tremendous.
The proportion of mobile phones in use that are smartphones is about
80 per cent in Myanmar – one of the highest rates in the world. The rate in the US, for comparison, is about 75 per cent. Not only are smartphones most people’s first mobile phone in Myanmar, they’re their first experience of any phone – they have skipped land
lines entirely. They have also skipped desktop computers and laptops as
a way to access the internet, and while most people online started with email and progressed to social media, in Myanmar, it’s straight to Facebook and chat apps.
This leap into smartphones is helping create the right conditions for a small but thriving group of entrepreneurs running businesses that in many cases are themselves making leaps in market development.
The pace of development has taken even those operating at the cutting edge of it by surprise. Jon Fredrik Baksaas is CEO of Telenor, one of the new mobile operators in Myanmar. “This is still early days, but what
a start,” he told analysts in 2015. “Obviously the Myanmar economy has more money in circulation than we originally thought.”
NEW IDEAS, LEAPING HURDLES
As we have seen in other fast-growth markets, it is often overseas-educated people returning to their country of origin who create the first wave of new businesses and new brands. In Myanmar, returnees or repatriates
are launching new businesses and inspiring others to do the same.
While this is not an inherently entrepreneurial society – often parents will encourage their children to pursue a safe career rather than take the risk of starting their own business – start-ups founded by local people are beginning to emerge. Many use technology to leapfrog developments that other markets have evolved through.
In their report Mapping Yangon’s Emerging Start-Up Ecosystem, Project Hub and USAID highlight returnee- founded businesses such as Koe Koe Tech, a health-related app to link patient records in hospitals and clinics, and Rebbiz, an online classified ad site for cars, homes and jobs – launched in a market with barely any exposure to offline classifieds. A new online travel booking service, Oway, was founded by Nay Aung, who grew up in Myanmar, lived in the US and UK and worked at Google, and returned to launch the business.
Other launches include Rosy, started by a Yangon woman in 2014, to sell her fabrics and clothing directly from her home and via Facebook, and Smart Deals Myanmar, which provides online coupons for shops and restaurants, bypassing the clip-and-collect paper coupons that consumers in more developed economies used for decades.
Jumping technology hurdles
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