A year after Telenor Myanmar launched mobile service in Mandalay with just 68 base stations, it now has more than 3,000 sites nationwide, which provide service coverage to more than 53 per cent of the population.

Telenor Myanmar CEO Petter Furberg (pictured), commenting in a post celebrating its one-year anniversary, said that to deliver quality service across Myanmar it will need to build upwards of 8,000 sites. “We are about a third of the way through and that remains our goal in the next three to four years.”

In twelve months the operator has added 9.5 million connections for a 34 per cent market share. Foreign rival Ooredoo, which launched at about the same time, has 4.3 million connections for a 15 per cent share.

State-owned MPT has seen its share drop from 100 per cent to just over 50 per cent in Q2, according to GSMA Intelligence, while its subscriber base has almost doubled to 14 million.

Furberg noted that the share of smartphones has grown faster than that of other markets. “Some reports place Myanmar in the top five countries with the highest net additions in subscribers, behind only China and India and ahead of Indonesia and Japan. Indications are that future growth will come from data, at a faster rate than we initially expected.”

At the end of June 55 per cent of its customer base were active data subscribers.

He characterised Telenor’s experience in Myanmar over the past couple of years as both challenging and enriching. “Challenging in the sense that Myanmar has only recently rejoined the fold of nations after many years in isolation, and is in the process of reforms on many fronts. This naturally creates a lot of momentum in many different areas, but one also occasionally feels some drag – with processes and ways of working often feeling dated, and sometimes quite far behind neighbouring nations.”

He said he feels centrally involved in this process of transforming the country and the telecoms sector alone has seen immense changes over the past year.

Furberg summed up his time in the country by pointing to a global survey that put Myanmar, which was led by the military for decades and had a centrally-directed economy until recently, as the number one country in the world on optimism. Responding to two questions, 96 per cent of the people of Myanmar said they believed that their generation will live a better life than that of their parents and 95 per cent felt their children’s generation will live a better life than theirs.