HÀ NỘI — Telecom provider Viettel has unveiled plans to officially inaugurate its mobile phone network in Myanmar under the trade name Mytel on June 9, 2018.

This would be Viettel’s 10^th foreign market. At 53 million, Myanmar is set to become Viettel’s biggest foreign market in terms of population.

In its first year of official operations, Mytel plans to invest in telecommunications infrastructure with more than 7,000 4G base transceiver stations (BTSs) and over 3,000km of fibre cable.

By the time it launches operations, Mytel will be the first and only mobile network in Myanmar to provide 4G service nationwide.

Lê Đăng Dũng, Viettel’s deputy general director, said while Myanmar has experienced rapid economic growth, mobile phone density in the country has remained low, creating opportunities for the telecommunications sector in general and Viettel in particular.

“We are targeting two to three million customers in Myanmar in 2018,” Dũng said.

Mytel is the brand name of Telecom International Myanmar – a joint venture between Viettel Global, a Viettel subsidiary, and its two partners in Myanmar, Star High Public Company and Myanmar National Telecom Holding Public (MNTH).

Mytel has a total investment capital of US$1.5 billion, accounting for up to 66 per cent of Vietnamese-registered capital into Myanmar. With the project, Việt Nam jumped from the 10^th position to 7^th among 49 countries and territories investing in Myanmar, and is the second largest ASEAN investor in the country.

Mytel is the 4^th mobile phone network in Myanmar, along with State-owned MPT, which has a 42 per cent share of the market, Teleenor (Norway), which has 35 per cent, and Ooredoo (Qatar), with 23 per cent.

Myanmar has been Viettel’s foreign market with the highest economic growth rate, at 7 per cent so far. It also has high growth in the telecommunications and IT sector.

From having with the lowest mobile phone usage rate in the world, Myanmar has experienced a stunning mobile phone SIM usage per capita growth from 10 per cent to 90 per cent after only three years. The total number of subscribers has risen from 600,000 to over 16 million.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Myanmar could increase its economy’s scale four-fold to $200 billion by 2030. The IMF also said the finance, banking, energy, telecommunications, and IT sectors offer the most opportunities for foreign investors in terms of both market potential and human resources. — VNS