KINGSTON–The Dig­i­cel Group has an­nounced its bid for a telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions li­cence in Myan­mar, for­mer­ly known as Bur­ma.The com­pa­ny said that it sub­mit­ted its ex­pres­sion of in­ter­est in a bid­ding process, which is ex­pect­ed to yield two new li­censed op­er­a­tors with­in the next five months.

The win­ners of the two na­tion­wide telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions li­cences are ex­pect­ed to "meet or ex­ceed spec­i­fied pop­u­la­tion and ge­o­graph­ic cov­er­age tar­gets".Dig­i­cel is vy­ing against at least four oth­er telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies who have of­fi­cial­ly ex­pressed in­ter­est to the ten­der se­lec­tion com­mit­tee, ac­cord­ing to news re­ports. Sin­ga­pore's SingTel, Nor­way's Te­lenor, Malaysia's Ax­i­a­ta Bhar­ti, and In­dia's Air­tel are al­so said to be among the bid­ders.

Tele­den­si­ty in Myan­mar is less than ten per cent of the pop­u­la­tion but the coun­try's gov­ern­ment has pub­licly ex­pressed its aim to have an over­all tele­den­si­ty to 75 per cent to 80 per cent by 2016. There were 5.4 mil­lion mo­bile phone sub­scribers and the 600,000 fixed-line users at the end of De­cem­ber 2012.

Dig­i­cel's founder De­nis O'Brien has been quot­ed by the The Myan­mar Times as say­ing that his group is pre­pared to in­vest up to US$1 bil­lion in­to de­vel­op­ing the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work.