One of the world’s last great boomtowns

[Editor’s note: Our Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in for Simon today from Yangon, Myanmar.] Since so much of Asia is on holiday for the Lunar New Year, I decided to travel to Myanmar to check out how the economy is developing.
Myanmar was once the wealthiest economy in Southeast Asia. But decades of isolation and military rule have turned it into the poorest.
Myanmar is, no doubt, the Cuba of Southeast Asia.
For the last few years, however, the country has started emerging from this isolation. The military government has begun to relax its stranglehold and play nice with the rest of the world.
Just since my last trip to the country a few years ago, I can hardly believe the extraordinary progress.
A few years ago there was hardly any mobile phone coverage. All bandwidth was strictly controlled by the Army, and we pitiful civilians had no access to the network.
As late as 2013, only 7 in 100 people had a mobile phone. Now every second person in Yangon has one – usually a new Chinese-made smart phone.

This post was published at Sovereign Man on February 10, 2016.