SCG budgets Bt12.4-billion for greenfield cement plant in Myanmar

THE NATION 

Siam Cement Group yesterday said it would invest Bt12.4 billion for its first integrated greenfield cement plant in Myanmar to serve the rising demand in that market.

Kan Trakulhoon, president and chief executive of SCG, said the board of directors approved the investment to construct its first fully integrated cement plant in Myanmar under that country's Foreign Investment Law. Construction is expected to begin by mid-2016. The cement plant, with annual output capacity of 1.8 million tonnes, will be strategically located in Mawlamyine, where there is a long-term supply of limestone complemented by access by boat to Yangon, Myanmar's primary commercial hub.

The plant will include a 40-megawatt power plant with the latest clean technology for internal power consumption, supporting port facilities, and other infrastructure for future expansion.

"SCG has solidified its position as one of Myanmar's market leaders in terms of dependable product attributes, brand exposure, supply-chain efficiency, and depth of distribution channels," Kan said. "The Myanmar cement market was estimated at approximately 4 million tonnes in fiscal year 2012, and is forecast to grow annually at 10 per cent over the next five years."

In fiscal 2012, SCG exported about 1.7 million tonnes of cement to Myanmar.

Kan said this project was a major investment to support growth of the cement-building-materials business in Myanmar and elsewhere in ASEAN after recent announcements that it would construct cement plants in Indonesia and Cambodia. It is in accordance with the company's strategy to become a sustainable business leader in Asean.

With a majority stake in the Myanmar plant, SCG says it places importance on sustainable development. That includes the 40MW power plant, a 9MW waste-heat generator system for reduced electrical usage, supporting port facilities, and other basic infrastructure.

SCG's stock price yesterday closed at Bt410, down by 0.97 per cent from last Friday.

Bualuang Securities yesterday noted in research that the cement, petrochemicals and building-material businesses would strengthen SCG's growth in the next few years. The growth of its cement business will be driven by rising sales revenue backed by new investment and the increasing demand in Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Bualuang said the two new cement plants in Indonesia and Cambodia would be able to operate commercially in 2015 and the one in Myanmar in 2016.

For its building-materials business, SCG will focus more on mergers and acquisitions.

Read More

ကိုးႏိုင္ငံ စီးပြားေရး သံမွဴးမ်ားႏွင့္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္၍ လယ္ယာထြက္ကုန္ သီးႏွံမ်ား ေရာင္းခ်ႏိုင္ဟုဆို

မႏၲေလးၿမဳိ႕ေတာ္ရွိ လယ္ယာထြက္ကုန္ သီးႏွံမ်ား ျပည္ပသို႔ တိုက္႐ိုက္ တင္ပို႔ ေရာင္းခ်ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံေပါင္း ကိုးႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ခန္႔အပ္ထားေသာ စီးပြားေရး သံမွဴးမ်ားႏွင့္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ကုန္သြယ္မႈ ျမႇင့္တင္ေရး ဦးစီးဌာန ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးတိုးေအာင္ျမင့္ က ေျပာၾကား သည္။

မႏၲေလး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္ႏွင့္ ဆန္စပါး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္တြင္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔ နံနက္ပိုင္းက က်င္းပသည့္ ကုန္သြယ္မႈ ျမႇင့္တင္ေရး ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေနမႈ မ်ား ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ၎က အထက္ပါအတိုင္း ထည့္သြင္း ေျပာၾကား သြားေၾကာင္း အဆိုပါပြဲ တက္ေရာက္သူမ်ားထံမွ သိရသည္။

ေဟာင္ေကာင္၊ ဂ်ပန္၊ တ႐ုတ္၊ အိႏၵိယ၊ ထိုင္း၊ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား၊ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု၊ စင္ကာပူ၊ ဘယ္လ္ဂ်ီယံ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားတြင္ စီးပြားေရး သံမွဴးမ်ား ခန္႔အပ္ၿပီး ျဖစ္ရာ ၎တို႔မွ တစ္ဆင့္ စီးပြားေရး သတင္း အခ်က္အလက္မ်ား ရယူႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးတိုးေအာင္ျမင့္ က ေျပာၾကား သည္။

“သံမွဴးေတြရဲ႕ အီးေမးလ္ လိပ္စာေတြ ေပးသြားတယ္။ သူတို႔နဲ႔ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ဖို႔၊ သတင္း အခ်က္အလက္ေတြ ရယူႏိုင္ဖို႔ ေျပာတယ္” ဟု မႏၲေလး ဆန္စပါး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးထြန္းထြန္းႏိုင္က ဆိုသည္။

စီးပြားေရး ေစ်းကြက္ႏွင့္ ကုန္သြယ္မႈ အခြင့္အလမ္းမ်ား ေပၚေပါက္ လာေစေရးအတြက္ ကုန္သြယ္ဘဏ္ ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားအၾကား ေျမျပင္ သတင္း အခ်က္အလက္မ်ား ရရွိႏိုင္ေစေရး ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေနၿပီ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အျပည္ျပည္ဆိုင္ရာ ကုန္သြယ္မႈ ျမႇင့္တင္ေရး ဌာနမွ တာဝန္ရွိသူ တစ္ဦးက ေျပာၾကားသည္။

“အဲဒီႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေစ်းကြက္ ဘာလိုအပ္ခ်က္ ရွိလဲ၊ ကိုယ့္ႏိုင္ငံကေန ဘာေတြ တင္ပို႔ ေရာင္းခ်ႏိုင္မလဲ၊ ႏွစ္ႏိုင္ငံ ကုန္စည္ျပပြဲေတြ၊ စီးပြားေရး ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲေတြ ပိုလုပ္လာႏိုင္တာေပါ့” ဟု ၎က ဆိုသည္။

မႏၲေလးၿမဳိ႕ေတာ္ရွိ ကုန္သည္မ်ားအေနႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံျခား ကုန္သည္မ်ားႏွင့္ တိုက္႐ိုက္ ဆက္သြယ္ ေရာင္းခ်သည့္ အေနအထား မရွိသျဖင့္ မိ႐ိုးဖလာ ကုန္သြယ္မႈ အဆင့္တြင္သာ ရွိေနေၾကာင္း မႏၲေလးၿမဳိ႕ေတာ္ အေျခစိုက္ ပဲကုန္သည္မ်ားက သုံးသပ္ ေျပာၾကားသည္။

“ျပည္ပနဲ႔ တိုက္႐ိုက္ ေရာင္းႏိုင္ဖို႔ဆိုတာ ထင္သေလာက္ မလြယ္ပါဘူး၊ ဒီလိုပဲ ျပည္တြင္းေစ်းကြက္မွာပဲ ေရာင္းလိုက္ ဝယ္လိုက္ပဲ ရွိေနမွာပါ” ဟု မႏၲေလး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္မွ ပဲကုန္သည္ တစ္ဦးက ဆိုသည္။

Read More

Environmental impacts of Thilawa project informed to locals

Thilawa SEZ Management Committee organized a meeting on August 23 to inform the local residents about possible consequences of the first phase of Thilawa Special Economic Zone Project.

Located in Thanlyin Township of Yangon suburb, Thilawa Special Economic Zone Project is a joint venture between Myanmar and Japanese governments.

Japan-based Nippon Koei Company and Resource and Environment Myanmar are together conducting the environmental and social impact assessments [EIA/SIA] of Thilawa project. A team of the representatives have explained their findings to the local people during the meeting on Friday, said Set Aung, the chairperson of Thilawa SEZ Management Committee.

"Independent companies are taking EIA/SIA of Thilawa Special Economic Zone Project. They have been chosen on the tender basis. Seven companies applied for it, and one was picked. According to the EIA procedures, the locals have been informed once about the project six months ago, before EIA process started. Now, the company conducting EIA is explaining to the locals," he said.

Thilawa SEZ is to be implemented in two phases. In the first phase, various factories including automobile plants and electronic-product manufacturing factories will be set up on the 5930-acre land. In the second phase, more plants including garment factories and food processing units will be erected.
The preliminary EIA report of Thilawa SEZ is expected to be released in September. Environmental management plan for the first phase of Thilawa SEZ will also be circulated to the respective government departments and organizations, according to Thilawa SEZ Management Committee.

Read More

Myanmar plans to implement two new deep seaport projects

Myanmar is planning to construct another two new deep seaports in the Tanintaryi coast and Ayeyarwady region, according to Myanmar Port Authority (MPA).

Thailand is interested to construct Kalargote deep seaport project located between Mawlamyaing and Yay in Tanintaryi coast. Singapore is also interested to invest at Ngayokekaung deep seaport located at Ngayokekaung Bay in Ayayarwady region.

Emerald Grand Hotel Group from Thailand and Super Axis Development Pte Ltd. from Singapore have signed MoU with the MPA in this month to analyse the potential to construct deep seaports in Kalargote and Ngayokekaung respectively.

In the analysis, the measurement of water resistance, ground testing, the effect of wind and tide and the overall expenses to construct a whole deep seaport are included.

Ngayokekaung deep seaport port will have the capacity to load 50,000-tonnes of goods and Kalargote deep seaport will be able to contain 30 vessels of about 50,000-tonnes, according to Chief Civil Engineer of the MPA Mya Than.

After completing the research, the MPA will decide whether the project will be conducted as a build, operate and transfer (BOT) system or a joint venture.

Industrial zones projects are included in those two projects and the MPA will cooperate with Ayeyawady regional government, Mon State government and Ministry of National Planning and Economic Development to implement the two projects.

Read More

Effectively regulating tax is vital to controlling rising land prices in Myanmar, finance deputy minister said at a press conference in Nay Pyi Taw on August 23.

Effectively regulating tax is vital to controlling rising land prices in Myanmar, finance deputy minister said at a press conference in Nay Pyi Taw on August 23.

“Actually, land prices increase because people buy and sell lands as if they are gambling. Myanmar has just started to develop and so people want to do some gambling. That gambling spirit cannot be easily stopped. We are trying to give a vent for the gambling spirit, and that is to establish the stock exchange. The stock exchange is a decent place for people,” said Mr Maung Maung Thein, Deputy Minister for Finance.

He said the first solution for controlling land prices is to ensure correct use of tax stamps on the land sale-contracts. “For a deal worth Ks10 million, some use the cheaper stamps used for those deals worth Ks5 million,” he said.

“The plan we are working to solve the issue is that regional governments will re-value current land prices and calculate the cost of each 1x1ft land. Yangon region has already completed it. After that, we will apply tax stamps accordingly,” the deputy minister added.

President’s Office Minister Soe Thein agreed with Maung Maung Thein on the need to enforce effective tax regulation. He said, “Land taxes need to be reviewed. Some taxes need to be applied. Now, people are dealing in lands and houses. If a tax is levied on each sale of land, the tax will control [rising land prices].”

Read More

Singapore developers eye buyers inMyanmar

Singapore's biggest real estate developer, Far East Organization, is shifting the focus of its promotions in Myanmar from residential to commercial spaces.
At a property and sales exhibition, held August 17-18 at Yangon’s Parkroyal Hotel – its 14th in Myanmar since 2010 – the company pitched Singapore as a good match for Myanmar property investors looking for business properties.
“In the past, we mostly brought residential projects, but this time we’ve chosen projects preferred by Myanmar buyers, like commercial warehouses … and office space,” said Ko Kyaw Min Zin, team leader for Myanmar sales. Properties in the six projects being promoted ranged from S$1.7 million (US$1.34 million) to S$5 million.
Since 1960 Far East Organization has built more than 1000 high-end condo projects in Singapore. The seminar was co-organised with two other Singapore-based agencies, Rock Estate Management and Maverick Estate Company.
the myanmar time

Read More

သီလ၀ါ၊ ထား၀ယ္၊ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴစသည့္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းမ်ားအျပင္ တနသၤာရီ ကမ္း႐ိုးတန္းႏွင့္ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း ေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းသစ္ႏွစ္ခု ထပ္မံတည္ေဆာက္ရန္ စီစဥ္

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနသည့္ သီလ၀ါ၊ ထား၀ယ္၊ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴစသည့္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းမ်ားအျပင္ တနသၤာရီ ကမ္း႐ိုးတန္းႏွင့္ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း ေဒသႀကီးတို႔တြင္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းသစ္ႏွစ္ခု ထပ္မံတည္ေဆာက္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာ့ဆိပ္ကမ္း အာဏာပိုင္မွ သတင္းရရွိပါသည္။

မြန္ျပည္နယ္ ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္ၿမိဳ႕ႏွင့္ ေရးၿမိဳ႕အၾကားရွိ တနသၤာရီ ကမ္း႐ိုးတန္းတြင္ ကုလားဂုတ္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းအား ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံမွ လည္းေကာင္း၊ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္းေဒသႀကီးရွိ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္းေအာ္တြင္ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္း ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းအား စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံမွ လည္းေကာင္း အေကာင္ေဖာ္ရန္ စိတ္၀င္စားမႈ ရွိေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံမွ Emerald Grand Hotel Group သည္ ကုလားဂုတ္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္း တည္ေဆာက္ရန္အတြက္ ကုလားဂုတ္ေဒသတြင္ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေျခ ေလ့လာမႈ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံမွ Super Axis Development pte.ltd ကုမၸဏီသည္ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္း ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္း တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေျခ ေလ့လာမႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္သြားရန္ ျမန္မာ့ဆိပ္ကမ္း အာဏာပိုင္ႏွင့္ ယခုလအတြင္း သေဘာတူလက္မွတ္မ်ား ေရးထိုးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။

အဆိုပါ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ေခ် ေလ့လာမႈမ်ားတြင္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္း တည္ေဆာက္ရန္အတြက္ ေရအားစမ္းသပ္မႈ၊ ေျမသားစမ္းသပ္မႈ၊ လိႈင္းေလသက္ေရာက္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္း တစ္ခုလံုး၏ ခန္႔မွန္းကုန္က်စရိတ္ တြက္ခ်က္မႈမ်ားအားလံုး ပါ၀င္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။
မြန္ျပည္နယ္ ေမာ္လၿမိဳင္ၿမိဳ႕ႏွင့္ ေရးၿမိဳ႕အၾကားရွိ တနသၤာရီ ကမ္း႐ိုးတန္းတြင္ ကုလားဂုတ္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းအား ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံမွ လည္းေကာင္း၊ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္းေဒသႀကီးရွိ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္းေအာ္တြင္ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္း ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းအား စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံမွ လည္းေကာင္း အေကာင္ေဖာ္ရန္ စိတ္၀င္စားမႈ ရွိေနေၾကာင္း၊ ခန္႔မွန္းေျခအားျဖင့္ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္း ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းသည္ တန္ခ်ိန္ငါးေသာင္းခန္႔ရွိ နိုင္ငံတကာ ပင္လယ္ကူး သေဘၤာမ်ား ဆိုက္ကပ္ႏိုင္မည့္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းတစ္ခု ျဖစ္လာႏိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ ကုလားဂုတ္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းသည္ တန္ခ်ိန္ငါးေသာင္းခန္႔ရွိ နိုင္ငံတကာ ပင္လယ္ကူးသေဘၤာ အစီး ၃၀ တစ္ၿပိဳင္နက္ ဆိုက္ကပ္ႏိုင္မည့္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းတစ္ခု ျဖစ္လာႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ျမန္မာ့ဆိပ္ကမ္း အာဏာပိုင္မွ ၿမိဳ႕ျပအင္ဂ်င္နီယာခ်ဳပ္ ဦးျမသန္းက ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ေလ့လာတြက္ခ်က္မႈမ်ား ၿပီးစီးပါက စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံမွ Super Axis Development pte.ltd ကုမၸဏီသည္ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္းေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းအား လည္းေကာင္း၊ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံမွ Emerald Grand Hotel Group သည္ ကုလားဂုတ္ ေရနက္စီမံကိန္းအား လည္းေကာင္း တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနၿပီး၊ ျမန္မာ့ဆိပ္ကမ္းအာဏာပိုင္ အေနျဖင့္ အဆိုပါ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းမ်ားအား BOT စနစ္ (သို႔မဟုတ္) Joint Venture စနစ္ျဖင့္ တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ ဆက္လက္ဆံုးျဖတ္သြားမည္ဟု သိရသည္။

ကုလားဂုတ္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းႏွင့္ င႐ုတ္ေကာင္း ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းမ်ားတြင္ စက္မႈဇုန္ စီမံကိန္းမ်ားကိုပါ တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ စီစဥ္ေနၿပီး၊ အဆိုပါ စက္မႈဇုန္ စီမံကိန္းမ်ားအား ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္းေဒသႀကီး အစိုးရအဖဲြ႔၊ မြန္ျပည္နယ္ အစိုးရအဖဲြ႔မ်ားႏွင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားစီမံကိန္းႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရး ဖြံၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈ ၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္သြားမည္ဟု သိရသည္။

Read More

Foreign trade exceeds $7 billion for first quarter

In first three months of fiscal year 2013-14, Burma’s foreign trade hit over US $7 billion, an increase of 15 percent on the same period last year, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce.
Of the total trade volume, Burmese exports amounted to $3. 161 billion while imports totaled $3.919 billion, making a total of $7.080 billion. In the first three months of the 2012-13 period, exports amounted to $3.152 billion with imports standing at $3.010 billion, a total of $6,162 billion.
Dr. Maung Aung, an advisor to the Ministry of Commerce, said priority is currently given to the import sector as the country embarks on a period of building and renewed openness.
“We have given priority to importing goods and investments for the benefit of long-term economic development,” he said. “That is why the amount of imports has significantly increased.”
He said that although imports of rice and various beans have decreased, traders should expect a raise in those goods in the future. He added that Burma has seen a sharp rise in the import of commodities and raw materials in the industry sector.
Thailand, China and India remain Burma’s main exporting partners while China, Singapore and Japan are the top three importers from Burma.
Burma expects to reach a total of $25 billion in foreign trade for the entire 2013-14 fiscal year.
                                                          by ;DVB

Read More

Myanmar is new battleground for business

Indian companies seek to wrest business from Chinese firms in the world's 'next economic frontier'

Mumbai (Business Times (subscription)

MYANMAR, called Asia's "next economic frontier" by the International Monetary Fund, is the new battleground for Indian companies seeking to wrest business from Chinese firms.

Export-Import Bank of India, the state-controlled trade financing institution, has pledged US$800 million in Myanmar, which includes funds to upgrade the Yangon-Mandalay railway and a plant for Tata Motors to assemble vehicles in the South-east Asian nation, Executive director david Rasquinha said. China, which has beaten Indian companies in the race to invest in energy assets from Kazakhstan to Venezuela, has agreed to lend more than US$2.4 billion in Myanmar.

Exim Bank of India faces an uneven contest as China Development Bank, which has a loan book more than three times the size of the World Bank, and the Export-Import Bank of China offer cheap loans to snare business. The Indian lender plans to sign credit agreements of as much as US$500 million by next month to participate in an economy that the IMF forecasts will expand 7 per cent over the next five years.

"We shouldn't get pessimistic because competition is there," Mr Rasquinha said. "We should be seeing the size of the pie and fighting smart."

State-run Chinese companies have spent US$19.5 billion this year acquiring energy and resources assets overseas versus India's single US$2.5 billion investment by Oil & Natural Gas Corp.

Exim Bank of India has been focusing on Africa. About 60 per cent of the Indian lender's lines of credit are for countries in the continent, Mr Rasquinha said. It has so far signed 172 lines of credit with commitments of about US$10.5 billion, covering 75 nations, he said. That compares with a US$219 billion loan book at Exim Bank of China.The Indian lender expects to mirror some of its African success in Myanmar. Exim Bank is trying to "excite" Indian companies to conduct business in Myanmar, Mr Rasquinha said.

The lender charges a floating 50 basis point over the London interbank offered rate to a fixed 2 per cent on overseas lines of credit, Mr Rasquinha said.

Bharti Airtel, India's biggest mobile carrier, was among companies that had bid for a telecom licence in Myanmar, the nation's selection committee said on its website in April.

Norway's Telenor ASA and Ooredoo QSC of Qatar won licences to expand telecommunications in Myanmar, one of the world's last remaining untapped markets where only about one in 10 people has a mobile phone.Myanmar needs US$650 billion of investments by 2030 to support an 8 per cent gross domestic product growth potential, according to McKinsey Global Institute, the research unit of McKinsey & Co.

Myanmar's liberalisation may reduce the nation's traditional dependence on China, according to Olivia Boyd, a Beijing-based energy analyst at IHS Global Insight.

"Myanmar's dependence on China is lessening," Ms Boyd said. "Chinese companies now wield less bargaining power, meaning they may face further contract revision of this sort in the future." Bloomberg

Read More

Myanmar Minister of Tourism disagrees on foreign visitors staying in private homes

YANGON- The daily English-speaking newspaper Myanmar Times reported a few days ago that Minister for Hotels and Tourism U Htay Aung was not in favour of foreign visitors staying in private homes in Myanmar “as their manners are not appropriate for local residents” as quoted from the Minister.

The Minister indicated that foreigners would probably have difficulties to follow the customs of locals and if they do not, it might create a cultural shock for their guests. He was referring at customs such as sleeping facing the east or the fact to share only a single spoon when eating soup in a family.

All these comments came during a meeting of Mandalay’s tourism players – including hoteliers and tour guides. The Minister then indicated that “homestays” would only be considered as suitable when foreigners visit remote areas and where they are no other choices. Where hotels are available, he added, particularly in larger urban centres such as Yangon or Mandalay, such arrangements should not be permitted.

“The manners of some foreigners are not appropriate for Myanmar people. But we have to choose homestay where there are no hotels or guest houses. In the meantime, we also need to [stay] strictly alert to possible risks,” he said at the meeting, which was held at Mandalay’s Swan Hotel.

While technically banned, homestays can however be arranged by guides when tourists go on multidays treks. They would generally stay at monasteries.

The Myanmar Times quoted Ko Thaung Naing Oo, from the Myanmar Tourist Guide Association’s Mandalay branch, who explained that homestays would certainly help to alleviate the country’s hotel shortage. However, it would then request from tour operators to make an effort of explaining properly to visitors what are the customs and the way to behave as a private guest of a Myanmar host family.

The current lack of adequate accommodation for visitors to Myanmar is a concern as tourism continues to grow rapidly. After topping a million foreign travellers last year, The Minister for Hotels and Tourism indicated earlier in July that tourist arrivals are growing by 30% this year and that visitors could reach 1.8 million travellers by year end.

Talking to Myanmar Upper House, Minister U Htay Aung declared that the country is still “in need to develop infrastructure, supporting and providing services in line with the tourist increase. We have about 30,000 hotel rooms ready for the tourists. About 10,000 more rooms will be ready in the end of this year”.

Read More

ျမန္မာတြင္ အာဆီယံႏိုင္ငံမ်ား ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈ ေဒၚလာ ၁၄ ဘီလီယံေက်ာ္

ရန္ကုန္၊ ၾသဂုတ္ ၂၃

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ အာဆီယံႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွ လာေရာက္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားေသာ
ႏိုင္ငံျခားရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈမွာ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၄ ဘီလီယံေက်ာ္ ရွိေၾကာင္း ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈႏွင့္ ကုမၸဏီမ်ား ညႊန္ၾကားမႈ ဦးစီးဌာနက ဇူလိုင္လအထိ ထုတ္ျပန္ေသာ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

အာဆီယံႏိုင္ငံမ်ားက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈမွာ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၄၁၃၀ ဒသမ ၁၃ သန္းရွိၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံေပါင္း ေျခာက္ႏိုင္ငံမွ လုပ္ငန္းေပါင္း ၂၂၃ ခုတြင္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံျခင္းျဖစ္ကာ ကုန္ထုတ္ လုပ္မႈလုပ္ငန္းတြင္ အမ်ားဆုံး ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ယင္းစာရင္းမ်ားအရ သိရသည္။

အာဆီယံႏိုင္ငံမ်ားအနက္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံက အမ်ားဆုံး ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားၿပီး အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၀ ဘီလီယံနီးပါး ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားကာ စင္ကာပူက ေဒၚလာ ၂ ဘီလီယံေက်ာ္၊ မေလးရွားက ေဒၚလာ တစ္ဘီလီယံေက်ာ္၊ ဗီယက္နမ္က ေဒၚလာ သန္းငါးရာေက်ာ္၊ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားက ေဒၚလာ သန္းႏွစ္ရာ့ငါးဆယ္နီးပါးႏွင့္ ဘ႐ူႏိုင္းႏိုင္ငံက ေဒၚလာ ေလးသန္းေက်ာ္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားသည္။

“ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈေတြအားလုံး တိုင္းျပည္အတြက္ တကယ္အသုံးဝင္ဖို႔ေတာ့ လိုတယ္။ အာဆီယံႏိုင္ငံေတြက AEC တို႔၊ AFTA တို႔စာရင္ ဒီထက္ပိုဝင္ လာပါလိမ့္မယ္” ဟု သမဝါယမဝန္ႀကီး ဌာနမွ အၿငိမ္းစားအရာရွိ ဦးရန္ေနာင္က မွတ္ခ်က္ျပဳသည္။

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ျပည္ပမွလာေရာက္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈ ပမာဏသည္ ယခုႏွစ္ ဇူလိုင္လအထိ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၄၂ ဘီလီယံေက်ာ္ ရွိသည္။

ထို႔အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ဥေရာပႏိုင္ငံမ်ားမွ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ေလးဘီလီယံနီးပါး ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားၿပီး ေဟာင္ေကာင္ က ေဒၚလာေျခာက္ဘီလီယံ ေက်ာ္၊ ကိုရီးယားက ေဒၚလာသုံးဘီလီယံ ေက်ာ္၊ ဂ်ပန္က ေဒၚလာသန္းသုံးရာနီးပါး ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားသည္။

Read More

RIL, OVL, Cairn in race for Myanmar blocks

India's Reliance Industries, ONGC Videsh and Cairn India are vying with global energy giants Shell, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil for 30 offshore oil and gas blocks that Myanmar has put on offer.

In all, 61 companies have been pre-qualified to bid for 11 shallow water and 19 deepwater blocks in an international tender, according to Myanmar's Energy Ministry.

The shortlisted companies from India include RIL, ONGC Videsh (the overseas arm of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp), Oil India Ltd, Cairn India, gas utility GAIL India and Jubilant Offshore Drilling (JODPL).

International oil majors that pre-qualified include Shell, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Total of France, Norway's Statoil, Eni of Italy, Spain's Repsol, Anadarko Petroleum of US, Husky Energy, Hess of US, Murphy Oil, Premier Oil of UK, Woodside Energy and Delek Energy.

Asian national oil companies such as China National Petroleum Corp, Korea National Oil Corp, Korea Gas Corp and Japan's JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp have also been shortlisted.

A notice on the ministry's website said the shortlisted firms had been called to view data on the blocks on offer last month. Myanmar is looking at awarding the acreages in February or March next year.

OVL visited the data room on July 15, followed by OIL and Jubilant. Cairn India visited the data room on July 23, while GAIL did so the following day. RIL reviewed data on the blocks on July 25.

Data viewing will continue till August 12, the ministry notice said. According to the tender condition, international firms can submit bids for up to three blocks.

For the shallow water blocks, companies will have to team up with at least one Myanmar-owned company, while for the deepwater blocks, bidders will be expected to invest directly without any local participation, the ministry said.

Myanmar is simultaneously offering 18 blocks in its second onshore licensing round, for which OVL, Cairn, OIL, Jubilant and HPCL-owned Prize Petroleum have been pre-qualified from India.

In all, 59 companies have been shortlisted for the onshore blocks, including PTT Exploration and Production, Petronas, PetroVietnam, Sinopec, Total, Eni, Woodside and Exxon. Myanmar plans to award the onland blocks by December.

OVL and GAIL already have stakes in A-1 and A-3 blocks in Myanmar, which started production last month, and they are looking at consolidating their position in the energy-rich nation.

Read More

US businessmen to invest in Myanmar hotel sector

The Ministry of Hotels and Tourism announced that American businessmen have offered to invest in the hotel sector as privately owned enterprises or joint ventures with Myanmar partners.
The announcement was made after Senator Jim Webb, Christopher Kingsley from Brownstone Furniture and special delegates met with U Htay Aung, Minister of Hotels and Tourism.
The Americans have expressed interest to invest in Yangon, Pyin Oo Lwin and Bagan, to accommodate the growing number of visitors to Myanmar.
The Ministry of Hotel and Tourism office welcomed the interest to invest and explained the current situation in investment sectors.
There has been an unprecedented surge of foreign visitors to Myanmar since 2011. The number of visitors in 2012 skyrocketed to a record high of one million people. The demand for accommodation has hit the roof. However, Myanmar does not have the infrastructure to accommodate all the visitors yet. The issue has been widely covered in the international media. It has been reported that catering to the demands of all the visitors will not be possible for the next five years.
Hotels in Myanmar have also been criticized by local travel and tourism enterprises for its low standards and expensive rates, in comparison with other Asian countries.
Yangon, with 210 Hotels and a total of 9163 rooms, is facing an acute shortage of rooms. The Minster of Hotels and Tourism said that over 1000 of hotel rooms added by end of the year.

Read More

ျမန္မာတစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၃၄ လံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ျပဳထားၿပီး မႏၲေလးတုိင္း ေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၅၃ လံုး၊ အခန္း ၉၆၆၃ ခန္းျဖင့္ အမ်ားဆံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ထား

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၏ အဓိက ခရီးသြားေဒသျဖစ္ေသာ အင္းေလးကန္မွ ဟုိတယ္တစ္လံုးကုိ ေတြ႕ရစဥ္ (ဓာတ္ပုံ-ေအာင္မ်ဳိးသန္႔)
ျမန္မာတစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၃၄ လံုးအထိ ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ျပဳထားၿပီး ဇူလုိင္လကုန္ စာရင္းမ်ားအရ မႏၲေလးတုိင္း ေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၅၃ လံုး၊ အခန္း ၉၆၆၃ ခန္းျဖင့္ အမ်ားဆံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားကာ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းေဒသႀကီးတြင္ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၁၃ လံုး၊ အခန္း ၉၂၉၄ ခန္းျဖင့္ ဒုတိယအမ်ားဆံုး ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားေၾကာင္း ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားလာေရးလုပ္ငန္း ၀န္ႀကီးဌာန၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အရ သတင္းရရွိသည္။
ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ ျပဳထားသည့္ ျမန္မာတစ္ႏိုင္ငံလံုးရွိ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၃၄ လံုးတြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၃၀၄၀၁ ခန္းပါ၀င္ၿပီး ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၉၂၉၄ ခန္း ပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၂၁၃ လံုး၊ မႏၲေလးၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၃၇၄၉ ခန္းပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၈၇ လံုး၊ ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၂၅၃၇ ခန္းပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္အလံုး ၄၀၊ ပုဂံ-ေညာင္ဦးၿမိဳ႕တြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၂၃၅၁ ခန္း ပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၇၆ လံုး၊ ေတာင္ႀကီးအင္းေလးတြင္ အခန္းေပါင္း ၁၇၄၂ ခန္းပါ၀င္ေသာ ဟုိတယ္ ၆၂ လံုးတုိ႔ကုိ ဖြင့္လွစ္ခြင့္ျပဳထားေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
ထုိ႔အတူ ခရီးလွည့္လည္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္ ၁၁၃၂ ခု၊ ပုိ႔ေဆာင္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္ ၁၉၀ ခုႏွင့္ ဧည့္လမ္းညႊန္ လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္ ၃၃၄၃ ခုကုိလည္း ခြင့္ျပဳေပးခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံျခား ခရီးသြားဧည့္သည္ ၁ ဒသမ ၅ သန္းခန္႔ ၀င္ေရာက္မည္ဟု ခန္႔မွန္းထားၿပီး ခရီးသြားမ်ားျပားလာမႈေၾကာင့္ ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြား ကုမၸဏီ လုပ္ငန္းလုိင္စင္မ်ားကုိ တုိးျမႇင့္ခြင့္ျပဳေပးေနေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။
၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ရန္ကုန္ေလဆိပ္မွ ႏုိင္ငံျခား ခရီးသြားဧည့္သည္ ေျခာက္သိန္းေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ နယ္စပ္အသီးသီးမွ ၀င္ေရာက္သူ ေလးသိန္းေက်ာ္ရွိၿပီး စုစုေပါင္း တစ္သန္းေက်ာ္ လာေရာက္ခဲ့သည္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံျခားခရီးသြား ၀င္ေရာက္မႈ ဆက္တုိက္ျမင့္တက္လ်က္ရွိၿပီး ယခုႏွစ္တြင္၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ထက္ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ၄၀ ၀န္းက်င္ တုိးတက္၀င္ေရာက္မည္ဟု ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားလာေရးလုပ္ငန္း ၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက ခန္႔မွန္းထားသည္။
ဟုိတယ္မ်ားကုိ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈနယ္ေျမမ်ားႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားမ်ားကုိ ဆဲြေဆာင္ႏုိင္သည့္ ေဒသမ်ားတြင္ အဓိက ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာတစ္ႏုိင္ငံလံုးရွိ ဟုိတယ္အခန္း အေရအတြက္၏ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္း ၉၀ သည္ မႏၲေလးတုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ဧရာ၀တီတုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ပဲခူးတုိင္းေဒသႀကီးႏွင့္ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္တုိ႔တြင္ ဖြင့္လွစ္ထားျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။
၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္ ဇူလုိင္ ၁ ရက္အထိ ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားက႑တြင္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈသည္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၈၃ ဒသမ ၃၄ ဘီလ်ံေက်ာ္အထိ ရွိလာေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ထုိ႔အတူ ဟုိတယ္ႏွင့္ ခရီးသြားက႑တြင္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားဟုိတယ္ ၄၇ ခုရွိၿပီး အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၈၅ ဒသမ ၈၁၁ သန္း ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံထားကာ စုစုေပါင္း ႏုိင္ငံျခားရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမႈ ပမာဏ၏ ၃ ဒသမ ၆၉ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းရွိေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။     ဒီေနရာကကူးယူးထားသည္

Read More