Thura Soe-Paing is Myanmar’s accidental entrepreneur. Arriving back home in 2010 thanks to his Brazilian diplomat wife’s posting there, the former banker and consultant walked into three years of extraordinary political change – and a surprising new business developing mobile telephone-based banking.
“We didn’t expect any of this,” he recalls, amid the clatter of construction around his office in a new industrial estate on the outskirts of Yangon, the commercial capital. “I had planned to work on my golf game – not to be pulled in by all the various parts of industry that everyone talked to me about.”
Now the returnee has a veteran’s view of the opportunities and difficulties facing start-ups popping up across an economy that is opening up after decades of dictatorship. Since the military government handed power to a quasi-civilian successor in 2011, business people tempted by Myanmar’s estimated 60m consumers have had time for a few reality checks, as well as excitement about the possibilities in the many sectors that still barely exist. Obstacles ranging from international sanctions to soaring property prices make Myanmar a fast-moving test of entrepreneurial pedigree.