The purpose of this study is to find out the strategies that Telenor Myanmar had used to make a successful Greenfield investment entry in Myanmar and became one of the best multinational companies in Myanmar. Which means that access to proper health care and education are the priority of many countries, regardless of the country's development status. To begin with, Myanmar had long been isolated from the rest of the world for many decades.
Although the country was not all outdated technologies and trends as many would have imagined, Myanmar did have technologies and some of them could be compared to some of the countries in the region. However, Myanmar was actually slow to catch up with the rest of the developing countries. On this journey of transformation, one of the first multinational companies in the telecommunications sector to ever set foot in Myanmar was a Norwegian telecommunications giant, Telenor.
The writer believes that the strategies with which Telenor established its operations and gained market share as one of the leading multinationals are extremely well executed. The objective of this paper is for the readers to discover the strategies that a giant multinational company like Tenor used to enter Myanmar and then establish itself as one of the best multinational companies in this host country. By learning about the strategies used, the writer hopes that readers who may be related to investing in Myanmar will gain some useful ideas and insights from it.
One of the ways a parent company can invest in a country is by establishing a wholly-owned subsidiary in a host country.
Strategy
Strategy Formulation
Strategy Implementation
Corporate Strategy
Business Strategy
Functional Strategy
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
- Primary, Qualitative Research
- Research Questions
- Secondary Research
- News Journals Source
The purpose of the interview was to learn about Telenor's strategies, opportunities, risks and challenges that Telenor faced and how to overcome them in the eyes of a manager as well as an owner of a strategic business unit. First, as she was a chief executive, she oversaw key tree strategies that Telenor was formulating and implementing. Second, since it was a business unit owner, it itself had to formulate business strategies and implement them in its functional business units.
Thus, she was the perfect candidate for the author to be able to learn from all levels of strategy that Telenor used in Myanmar. Moreover, with the amount of previous experience she had before joining Telenor, she is fully aware of the external factors and situations in Myanmar and how Telenor would have and had adapted to them in detail. The main research question and the answer that this article would be able to provide is “How did Telenor strategically enter Myanmar and become one of the top multinational companies in the country while adapting to the external factors in the country? " The questions below were prepared in advance to guide the interviewer to receive the answers he wanted and the interviewer to give the answers more easily.
However, probing questions were asked after each question listed below to uncover more details and receive the full story of Telenor in Myanmar. The guided questions prepared for the interview are listed in Appendix A section of this research paper. The interview was conducted at one of the meeting rooms at her current workplace which ensures a smooth interview session without any interruption from possible noise pollution.
As the interview lasted approximately forty minutes, all the findings were thoroughly discussed. Since the chosen topic and company for this paper are widely known, the author was able to gather further sources of information, especially through news media websites. The benefit of referring to real news journals will help prove the quality of this research paper.
Furthermore, by referring to news journals, the writer will be able to discover the exact timeline of events and other information that the writer may not have been able to extract from the qualitative research interview due to the limited amount of time. The majority of the secondary source of information is collected from Myanmar Times, which is available on the internet and also available in English for the readers to refer to for more detailed information described in this paper. Most of the information that will be quoted from this paper will be the chronological timeline of Telenor in Myanmar.
FINDINGS
- Summary of the Findings from Interview and News Media
- Analysis
- Greenfield Investment Approach
- Strategies
- Corporate Strategy
- Business Strategy
- Functional Strategy
- Transformation and Change Management
Although some of the strategies adopted worked, some had to be redesigned as the external environment in Myanmar was very different from that of India. In terms of business strategy, since Myanmar in 2014 was in an era where most people did not yet use the Internet, Telenor focused on providing voice calls at the most affordable rates (Grace). Grace mentioned that within 5 years of entry, by 2020, Telenor wants 75% of the country to use mobile phones.
The first strategy comes in the form of people strategy, Telenor embraced diversity with 23 nationalities in the first phase of the company establishment (Grace). One of the ways in which the values of the company culture are enforced is by having orientation days specifically dedicated to teaching and embedding the company's values in the new employees (Grace). For example, many of the city's population had already used the internet from local internet cafes even before the mobile network came out, which makes it easier for Telenor to introduce a mobile internet package to the population.
However, in rural areas, many people did not even know how to do that. This supports the fact that many users in rural areas were still unaware of internet usage. For example, Telenor had to build telecommunications towers from scratch in the cities and on the outskirts of the country to support their goal of reaching every customer base in the country.
From the summary of findings, the author grouped the facts into some of the conceptual management frameworks to reflect on Telenor's successful strategic executions. Some of the strategies that have allowed Telenor to be one of the top mobile network operators in Myanmar today are discussed below. Some of the strategies were at the corporate level, some at the business level and finally, functional levels.
This strategy helped Telenor to build a larger portfolio of their operations worldwide and helped to merge a new market with a lot of potential to grow in their portfolio where most of the markets are in the maturity stage. From this it can be analyzed that the choice of the right market as an expansion strategy by analyzing the opportunities is the first step and will determine whether the rest of the followed strategy will fail or succeed since the other strategies' set of activities the corporate strategy set is (Nordmeyer, 2017). This move was strategically planned by Telenor as the author went on to research the data on Internet usage in Myanmar and found that in 2010 just less than 0.3 percent of the total population used the Internet (MM Times, 2018).
Third, having a strong financial background helped Telenor to invest in building much of the missing infrastructure in the country, preventing them from losing out in the competition with Ooredoo, who were also building a lot of infrastructure at the time used to be. From three of these approaches, from people, products, pricing to investment strategies, they all led to the corporate level strategy and ultimately to the business goal that Telenor had from the beginning, which was to expand into Myanmar and ensure that at least 75% of the country would have subscribed to the mobile network by 2020.
CONCLUSION
Unlike situational factors, consumer readiness is essential to the success of one's business. This is especially true for technology companies like Telenor, where the internet was unconventional then, especially for rural areas, proper change management of consumer behavior is actually necessary for people's acceptance of the products from the company. Therefore, the strategies that the company had laid must also be linked to this aspect.
Thus, at the end of this article, we know the importance of strategies and how a good strategy will help companies achieve the extraordinary just like Telenor did. Strategy is also supported by and must support the situational factors and consumer behaviour. A good strategy must be able to help the company reach its goal (Rothaermel, 2017) and it must listen and respond to all critical requirements.
2018) “Upgrading Myanmar's Internet Access”, mmtimes.com, June 2018, available at: https://www.mmtimes.com/news/upgrading-myanmars-internet-access.html (accessed 19 October 2019).
APPENDICES
Appendix A: Interview Questions
