We visited OCK’s ongoing undertaking in Yangon, Myanmar and came away feeling positive about its recent business expansion progress. After Myanmar opened up its telecommunication market by issuing two licenses to foreign telco network service providers – Qatar-based Ooredoo and Norwegian Telenor Group, OCK is aiming to complete the construction of 920 telecommunication tower sites (combination of 35m, 45m and 55m towers) across all 14 divisions in Myanmar by end-2016 for Telenor Myanmar. Given the current progress, we believe the group is largely on track to meet the deadline.

Already, OCK has secured sufficient financing of US$40.2 mln in syndicated term loan over a period of seven years for the tower constructions. The aforementioned loan serves as a springboard for OCK’s expansion into Myanmar as well as an underlying confidence of support from the financial sector. The management has further guided that there are no cost overrun, based on its current operations.

We also note that approximately 50 telecommunication towers have been constructed (refer to Figure 1 for OCK’s telecommunication tower) and the management aims to ramp-up its number of contractors, in line with the acceleration of construction works. The telecommunication towers are powered by a generator set (genset), which combines diesel engine and electric generator to generate electricity (refer to Figure 2 for OCK’s telecommunication tower’s genset). The uses of gensets lower operational costs, easily available and ease of maintenance.

Source: M+ Online Research - 11 Jul 2016