Vietnam’s Viettel Group unveiled on Monday the business strategy for Mytel, its Myanmar-based telecom company, which will begin operations this Saturday, June 9.

Mytel will focus on the data segment and new digital services, with D-A-T-A being its motto.

“[This] stands for D-igital & new services, A-dvanced technology, T-rustworthy, A-ffordable & various services,” the company said in a press release.

“The infrastructure and services provided by Mytel exactly reflect this motto.”

In its first year of official operations, Mytel plans to invest in telecommunications infrastructure with more than 7,000 4G base transceiver stations (BTSes) and over 30,000km of fiber cable.

By the time of its becoming operational, Mytel will have been the first and only mobile network in Myanmar to provide 4G services across the country.

Previously, other mobile phone service providers would provide 4G services in big cities before expanding into smaller cities and rural areas.

Upon launching, Mytel will provide calling and texting at 50 percent of current market rates and data charges 37 percent cheaper than market rates.

Calling, to be offered from June 9, will be billed in one-second blocks instead of the current 15- or 20-second blocks.

As an inaugural promotion, Mytel will offer the Mite Tal (meaning “super cool” in Burmese) strategic fee package.

For 4,000 Myanmarese kyats (US$3), subscribers will get 5GB and 250 minutes of calling within the Mytel network for 30 days.

But as an introductory offer, on top of this the company is providing for free 1.5 GB and 150 minutes of calling for three months, a 100 percent bonus on top-up value and call billing in one-second blocks after the free calls are used up.

A Mytel employee talks to her customers in Myanmar.

Le Dang Dung, 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,” Dung 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 $1.5 billion, accounting for up to 66 percent of Vietnamese-registered capital into Myanmar.

With the project, Vietnam jumped from the tenth position to seventh among 49 countries and territories investing in Myanmar, and is the second-largest ASEAN investor in the country (by the end of June 2017).

Mytel is the fourth mobile phone network in Myanmar, along with state-owned MPT, which has a 42 percent share of the market, Teleenor (Norway), with 35 percent, and Ooredoo (Qatar), with 23 percent.

Myanmar has been Viettel’s foreign market with the highest economic growth rate, at seven percent so far, and the largest population, with 53 million people.

It also has high growth in the telecommunications and IT sector.

A Mytel employee

From having the lowest mobile phone usage rate in the world, only above North Korea, Myanmar has experienced stunning mobile phone SIM usage per capita growth from ten percent to 90 percent after only three years of opening its economy.

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 fourfold 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.