28 August 2022

Vietnamese firms are confronting political risk from overseas investments as the price of doing business with Myanmar’s brutal military regime, a less predictable partner than the authoritarians they are accustomed to.

Vietnam’s largest venture in Myanmar is by VietTel, Vietnam’s largest cellular provider. The military-owned company has a major stake in Myanmar’s MyTel, which is also military-owned and has been hemorrhaging customers since the Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat that ousted Myanmar’s elected government.

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[...] Vietnam’s largest investment by far in Myanmar is in telecommunications. Mytel is a 2017 joint venture between VietTel, the military-owned Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC), and a number of smaller investors. The venture has been in operation since June 2018. It’s one of VietTel’s 10 overseas joint ventures.

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[...] Mytel has incurred the wrath of the Myanmar public and armed opposition groups more than any other foreign investment. There has been a public boycott of the firm. In the first quarter of 2021, immediately following the coup, it lost 2 million subscribers and suffered estimated losses of U.S. $25 million.

As a result of the coup, Coda, a Singapore-based payments firm, cut Mytel from its mobile payments platform in March 2021, another factor in the loss of subscribers.