Dig­i­cel Group has of­fi­cial­ly thrown its hat in the ring to be con­sid­ered 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 li­cenced op­er­a­tors with­in the next five months.

Al­ready, at least four oth­er telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies have of­fi­cial­ly ex­pressed in­ter­est, ac­cord­ing to sev­er­al news re­ports, and the ten­der se­lec­tion com­mit­tee has pushed back the dead­line for sub­mis­sions by 10 work­ing days to Feb­ru­ary 8.

Even while the dead­line ex­ten­sion may al­low even more suit­ors to show their in­ter­est, the com­pa­nies that emerge the win­ner will have to have deep pock­ets to meet the Gov­ern­ment's push for high­er tele­den­si­ty.

Myan­mar's gov­ern­ment aims to in­crease over­all tele­den­si­ty to 75 per cent to 80 per cent by 2016, even though the 5.4 mil­lion mo­bile phone sub­scribers and the 600,000 fixed-line users, as at the end of De­cem­ber, placed tele­den­si­ty at less than ten per cent of the pop­u­la­tion.

Dig­i­cel's founder De­nis O'Brien has al­ready said he is will­ing to lay down sig­nif­i­cant cap­i­tal. He was quot­ed by the The Myan­mar Times in Sep­tem­ber to say that he was pre­pared to in­vest up to US$1 bil­lion in­to de­vel­op­ing the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work. But Sin­ga­pore's SingTel, Nor­way's Te­lenor, Malaysia's Ax­i­a­ta Bhar­ti, and In­dia's Air­tel are al­so named among the bid­ders.

What the se­lec­tion com­mit­tee will use to de­cide who gets the li­cences are still not clear, but the coun­try will re­quire the win­ners of the two na­tion­wide telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions li­cences to "meet or ex­ceed spec­i­fied pop­u­la­tion and ge­o­graph­ic cov­er­age tar­gets".