On Tuesday 31st of March CITO representatives Kasper Westman and Victor Petersson visited Ericsson’s office in Yangon, Myanmar. There they met with Nu Yin Myint and Nga Kim. Nu Yin Myint, working as a Communications Manager, was one of the first local employees at the office when she started working for Ericsson in 2012, changing careers from the hotel business. Wanting to work for a global company was one of the reasons for choosing Ericsson. Nga Kim is the Project manager for Ericsson’s project Connect To Learn. After working for Ericsson in Vietnam since 2010, she got the opportunity to takeon this challenge at the office in Yangon.The fact that Ericsson is a highly innovative company with a changing environment all the time makes her want to work for Ericsson. She says it is a challenging work, yet exciting.
Ericsson is a global companythat is world leadingin mobile infrastructure and operations and business support solutions. They have customers in more than 180 countries, and with over 115,000 professionals all around the world, 187 languages are spoken. 44 % of the employees are under 35 years old. The office in Yangon was started in 2012. From a few employees it has grown to an office with about 270 employees, where 80 of them are locals and only 10-15 of them are Swedish.
Connect To Learn is one of many projects that Ericsson is working on. It is a global initiative in 14 countries around the world between Ericsson, the Earth Institute, Columbia University and Millennium Promise. Connect To Learn gives students in less developed countries opportunities of a modern and global classroom through access to mobile broadband and cloud-based ICT solutions. Thus, in Myanmar, Ericsson together with partners, is deploying mobile broadband and cloud solutions, combined with hands-on training in ICT to the project schools. The goal is to scale up access to quality secondary education, in particular for girls. Nga Kim tells us that Ericsson’s vision is that everything that benefits from being connected will be connected, and that it is all about an education with quality: laptops to teachers, tablets to students and the possibility to reach 21st century learning materials through their ICT devices. Partly, in this effort,
Ericsson is now working on providing 3G connection to 31 schools in 2 regions in Myanmar.
Nu Yin Myint and Nga Kim say that Myanmar is blooming right now. At the moment there are three operators in Myanmar, MPT, Telenor and Ooredoo. Since the third operator entered the market, the price for one SIM-card has gone from 250-500 USD to only about 10-15 USD. With this fact, mobile phones are getting cheaper, which brings a great development into the communication business and today there is a clear gap between supply and demand.
Not to forget is that making business in Myanmar is not always easy. Some of the greatest challenges are the rules and regulations. Myanmar, who recently opened up, after being closed for many years, still needs some more time to develop, according to Nga Kim and Nu Yin Myint.
When recruiting employees, Ericsson has started to focus on finding, selecting and train students from Technology Universities. Ericsson’s office in Yangon has a goal to localise their employees. Ericsson in Myanmar does keep the Swedish culture in some ways. Mostly by doing typical Swedish things such as Fika-break, and celebrating Swedish traditions.
If you are interested in knowing more about Ericsson, please visit www.ericsson.com.