Mobile penetration set for boost in Burma

Companies from around the world are circling the newly liberalised Southeast Asian state, eager to profit from one of the last remaining untapped markets in the region. Of particular interest is the telecom industry, with the World Bank estimating in 2011 that just three percent of Burmese people owning mobile phones.

After Samsung and Huawei entered the market with low cost devices in recent years, other providers have been attempting to carve a place in the new market. Taiwanese firm HTC launched a smartphone specifically tailored for the Burmese market on Monday, and have set about overcoming one of the key challenges faced by phone providers.

HTC have devised an on-screen Burmese-language keyboard which it says is the most advanced around. There is no internationally recognised standard for Burmese language symbols, meaning it’s especially tricky for firms trying to offer an advanced phones that can cater for the whole country.

The company’s Burma-born CEO Peter Chou told the BBC that it was his ambition to open up the country to international communication: “My aspiration is to design innovative smartphones that offer full compatibility with the Myanmar language, so that people in Myanmar can enjoy enhanced communications simply and easily.”

Speaking to Reuters, he explained that the keyboard HTC had devised would be the easiest to use: “You don’t have to spend two months to learn how to type it. You just type it. We want to give people here a computing device they don’t have to learn. They just try it, they just use it, they just get it.”

Other firms will be keen to see how popular HTC’s phone proves in a country not used to mobile phone use, let alone internet-connected devices.