As Southeast Asia’s final frontier market, Myanmar has no dearth of investment opportunities. There is a growing domestic market, abundant natural resources, cheap labour, and great agricultural potential.
Myanmar not only possesses significant potential for agricultural production, it also has rich reserves of minerals and natural gas.
Business opportunities in the country are abundant in proportion to the critical need for foreign direct investment.
We recently launched the Myanmar Investment Promotion Plan (MIPP) which aims to attract more than US$200 billion in investment through responsible and the quality business over the next 20 years, to help Myanmar’s transition to a middle-income country.
“I stand here to reaffirm our commitment to continue our reform and to build an investment-friendly environment,” said State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at the Invest Myanmar Summit 2019 in Nay Pyi Taw on 28 January.
Our priority investment areas include agriculture and related services, production of value-added goods from agricultural products, livestock production, breeding and production of fishery products, export promotion industries, import substitution industries, power sector, logistics industries, education services, healthcare industry, construction of affordable housing, and establishment of industrial estates.
We have created a business environment conducive to mutually beneficial investments by simplifying business rules and regulations, and welcoming all forms of responsible investment: public and private, national and global, in the form of capital as well as capacity.
We do not want to be a resource-exporting country. The only resource that we want to truly develop is human resources.
With a fairly large population of 53 million, half of whom are aged 30 or below, Myanmar also has a sizeable and expanding internal market which will surely benefit from greater cooperation and integration with external markets.
Therefore, we must increase collaboration with the private sector, an important partner and the most reliable engine for growth.
In addition, we have the opportunity to play a major role in supporting the expansion of trade and investment across the Asia-Pacific region and even the world, by offering access to the Indian and Pacific Oceans via the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, as well as to the neighboring economies of Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam and, of course, China.
The World Bank has acknowledged the positive change in Myanmar’s investment climate brought about by the current reforms and those implemented in 2017, the year we earned the Star Reformer Award. But we cannot and will not rest on our laurels.
We will continue to strive to improve the investment climate.
We only ask investors to ensure that they make responsible investments by incorporating environmental, social and governance factors in their undertakings.
We are confident that investing in Myanmar will bring good returns to investors._GNLM
