A question of perception

A question of perception

Thailand’s ambassador to Myanmar says changing his countrymen’s preconceived notions about their neighbour is a big part of the job.

Myanmar is famous for many things, among them soothsayers, but there is at least one person in Yangon who is less concerned with predicting the future than with managing present realities.

Pisanu Suvanajata, Thailand’s ambassador to Myanmar, has been trying his best to entice Thai investors, especially small and medium enterprises, to meet the neighbours, but he says it’s an uphill battle.

“The biggest stumbling block is the perception of Thais about Myanmar,” he admitted during a talk with Bangkok Post editors in Yangon recently.

Mr Pisanu, who until recently was Thailand’s consul-general in Guangzhou, China, is concerned that his countrymen could be missing out on Asia’s best growth story for the next decade.

“I blame the slow speed at which Thais are moving into Myanmar on the fact that they come with the wrong perception, if not a total misperception,” says the 52-year-old diplomat.

“They come in with the perception that Myanmar is like Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam after the [Vietnam] war, which is absolutely wrong because this country had never suffered due to war.”

The backwardness and underdevelopment of Myanmar have been due entirely to two factors: its government’s decision to close the country 50 years ago, and the worsening of economic conditions because of sanctions imposed against the military junta.

One major result of the sanctions, which are starting to fall away as Myanmar reforms, is that the country barely has a banking system to speak of.

Not that the lack of banks has stopped people from doing business — but cash is king.

Citing the example of an all-cash deal worth $200 million by a developer to build a condominium in Yangon, Mr Pisanu said that every house had a strongroom where the owners stored brand-new, crisp US dollar bills.

This, he explains, has been one of the reasons the country did not see much inflation after its currency was taken off the artificial peg to the dollar last year.

All this is good news for Thai banks that are gradually opening offices in Myanmar. But Mr Pisanu says that while they wait for licences to start full-service operations, the banks could do themselves and their potential customers a favour by helping to remit profits and labour wages back and forth between the two countries.

“With the presence of Thai banks here it would make investors more confident to come and invest,” he added.

While few Thai small businesses are operating in Myanmar, the opposite is not necessarily the case.

“Do you know the Water Library restaurant?” he asks, referring to an upscale dining spot with locations in Thong Lor and  Chamchuri Square in Bangkok.

“Yes, I do,” I reply.

“Do you know that the owner is a person from Myanmar?

This, he says, is an indication that people from Myanmar are not just looking at their own domestic market but also expanding outside home turf as well.

Mr Pisanu says he has been trying to spread the word by gathering as much information as possible and attending any event that features the words “promote Myanmar” in the invitation.

Apart from this, the embassy provides all the data it can in English to help a wider range of investors obtain greater knowledge. All this is done with just 13 diplomatic staff at the embassy and 20 local staff.

This compared with the US embassy which has 850 staff and the Australian embassy with 350 — and these numbers were prior to the lifting of sanctions by the western world.

“We are no longer people living in an ivory tower, and I am open to meeting anyone. I host dinners and lunches for anyone who wants to meet, while at the same time we open our facilities for people to host functions to help promote things,” he says.

The Thai embassy is located on a sprawling seven rai of land in one of the finest mansions in Yangon dating back more than 100 years, while the administration building has full facilities that can be used by companies such as a ballroom that can accommodate 300 people.

All this, he says, has been helping the embassy pursue its agenda to correct perceptions, “which is starting to work now’’.

“When I ask people to come, I don’t want them to come with megaprojects only. I understand the feelings of Thai people and Myanmar is in transition and not everything is in place,” says Mr Pisanu.

In his view, there are three major difficulties that investors face.

First is limited information. Even if there is a lot of data, whether it is reliable is anyone’s guess. International agencies such as the Asian Development Bank and World Bank are working with the government to ensure credible data but this will take time.

Second, the cost of doing business is going to be high. Property prices in Yangon bear no relationship to reality. Mr Pisanu notes that an empty piece of land next to the Thai embassy is being sold at $620 per square foot, the equivalent of 198,000 baht per square metre. The piece of land totals about 120 square wah, and the price is as high or even higher than for land on Silom Road in Bangkok.

Despite its woeful infrastructure, Yangon now boasts the 37th highest cost of living among major world cities (Paris is 46th by way of perspective). Therefore doing business is high risk and high return.

Third is the legal and regulatory environment. Investors worldwide were clamouring for a new FDI law last year, and the one that was eventually passed received good reviews. “I believe it is a good law,” says Mr Pisanu.

However, no one is talking about the law these days, though they should be. After all, interpretation and enforcement will be big questions since the country’s legal institutions are still weak.

Commenting on the one issue that everybody does talk about, Mr Pisanu says average labour wages in Yangon are about 80 baht per day but businesses have to accept that workers cannot survive on this wage and it should be about 120 baht.

The Thai embassy itself is raising the wages of its staff by up to 50% across the board.

“People survive here with their pinto as they carry food from their homes to eat during lunchtime,” he says.

Mr Pisanu, who is a keen student of astrology, says Myanmar has many people who believe in fortune telling.

Having seen powerful politicians coming in and out of Myanmar to visit the tiny, hunched, deaf-mute fortune teller E Thai (ET), Mr Pisanu has started to believe some of the things said by soothsayers. He can tell you over drinks who some of the most sought-after astrologers are and how precise they are in their predictions.

But if a lot of people are curious about the future, he regrets that many Thais seem obsessed by the distant past, more so than their neighbours, though government-to-government relations have been good.

“In general the people in Myanmar don’t have any bitter memory, except of the recent history of border clashes,” he says.

“If you have a chance to travel to ancient towns where people settled down after our former capital was overrun, you should go,” he says.

“I don’t know, I may be wrong but from the various trips I’ve made, be it to Mandalay, Amarapura and others, you will see small temples and from outside you will see Myanmar style but inside the art pieces are Thai which are very beautiful.”

These murals were the work of people who were forced to move to Myanmar after the fall of Ayutthaya, but Mr Pisanu maintains that if these artisans had been held under harsh conditions, such beautiful paintings would not have been possible.

Different countries have different ways of remembering and writing history, he concludes, and anyone looking at Myanmar should read the history on both sides before coming to a conclusion.

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