Myanmar

A $390m loan backing CVC Capital Partners’ acquisition of Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Green Towers (IGT) was abruptly put on hold this week after political turmoil rocked the country following a military coup. Pan Yue reports.

The Yangon Stock Exchange will be open for trading by international investors from March 20, according to an announcement by Myanmar’s securities regulator.

Logistics conglomerate Ever Flow River Group (EFR) has won approval from the Yangon Stock Exchange to join its sparsely populated board.

In less than a decade, Myanmar has gone from a mysterious country shut off from the outside world to a burgeoning frontier market with plenty of investment opportunities. The government has made tremendous strides, opening up to outside money. But for Myanmar to become a real success story, it needs to fully welcome foreign capital.

Myanmar has made a raft of regulatory changes to attract foreign investment, removing ownership limits and cutting red tape. But senior figures in the country admit that poor infrastructure is a major problem — and the solution requires private capital. Morgan Davis reports.

The issuance of two currency-linked notes on the private market should help stimulate local currency markets in Myanmar and Ukraine according to one syndicate banker.

In this round-up, China and the US will talk in Beijing at the end of the week, China’s interbank payment and settlement system survived the Lunar New Year red packet frenzy and a draft of the foreign investment law will be submitted in early March.

Yoma Strategic Holdings has become the first company from Myanmar to sell an international bond, raising the equivalent of $70m in the Thai baht market.

TMH Telecom Public Co will list on the Yangon Stock Exchange in Myanmar next week, having held an IPO that included a chunk of primary shares — the first flotation in the country with new stock.

Myanmar’s TMH Telecom Public Co is preparing to launch an IPO on the Yangon Stock Exchange, which will make it the fifth listing on the budding bourse.

This article is the third part in a series of four on China’s Belt and Road Initiative that we are publishing during the 2017 IMF-World Bank annual meetings in Washington DC. We have devoted two articles to the Road element and two to the Belt element, of which this piece is the first and focuses on the Asian part of the overland route

Myanmar may be in the middle of a crisis as more than half a million Rohingya flee anti-Muslim militants. But investors are willing to look past the humanitarian crisis and find opportunities in the frontier market.