When his car broke down in the countryside on a drive to Mandalay last year, the 29-year-old entrepreneur wandered into a nearby village for help and was surprised at how many people he saw on cellphones. "I came to realize that things are changing," he said in a restaurant near his Rangoon office, as the electricity fluttered on and off and the early rains of Burma's monsoon season came down.
Until just a few years ago, getting wireless access cost thousands of dollars in this largely offline corner of hyper-connected Asia, and the government was the only provider in town. Controlling the communications apparatus was a way for the junta to monitor its citizens and a lucrative source of revenue for favored business interests.
But along with a raft of other economic and political reforms since 2011, the government of Burma — which the former military regime renamed Myanmar — is making mobile phone access cheaper and opening its telecommunications market. As people here experiment with newfound freedom of expression and increasing access to information, nearly a dozen international wireless companies are furiously vying for the two mobile licenses that the government is auctioning off June 27.
The prize will be the right to operate in Southeast Asia's last untapped mobile market.
"It's the last country apart from North Korea where mobile penetration is in the single digits," says Denis O'Brien, the Irish billionaire who owns Jamaica-based Digicel. O'Brien is pursuing a bid with financial backing from investor George Soros. "There is a huge pent-up demand in Myanmar for mobile and Internet access," O'Brien said by phone.
The auction is shaping up to be an important test of whether Burma's newfound economic reforms will boost the fortunes of ordinary people here, and of just how much money foreign firms are ready to sink into the country as it navigates a hugely difficult and uncertain political and economic transformation. Also up for grabs this summer are the right to build a new airport near Rangoon and scores of oil and gas production sites.
"The next three months are going to be crucial," says Edwin Vanderbruggen, a Rangoon lawyer who works with foreign firms.
A ticket to the Internet
Reliable statistics are hard to come by in Burma — whether it's Internet usage or the size of the population — but most experts agree that, at most, 9 percent of Burma's nearly 60 million people have access to a mobile phone, concentrated in Rangoon and Mandalay.
The government says it wants to increase mobile-phone usage to 75 percent by 2016, and consulting firm McKinsey Co. projects Burma will require as much as $50 billion of investment in telecom infrastructure, including the wireless towers, fiber cables and wiring that it largely lacks. Far fewer people have a land line, meaning that cellphones will be the first phone that most people own.
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