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Tag: MySQUAR

  • Fastacash to launch payments via social network in Myanmar

    Fastacash to launch payments via social network in Myanmar

    Fastacash, a global platform enabling payments across social networks, has made a strategic investment in Myanmar focused company, MyPAY.

    MyPAY, which is developing a mobile payment system, also has a strategic partnership with MySQUAR,  a social network in Myanmar with approximately 1.5 million user accounts.

    Along with the investment, fastacash will also provide the technology platform to MyPAY to enable payments through the social network. fastacash will also support MyPAY’s go-to-market activities, including market insights and global partnership management.

    Through the fastacash platform, anyone using MyPAY will be able to transfer money, and airtime to their social connections, and make payments at retail points. MyPAY is expected to leverage MySQUAR’s user base of approximately 1.5 million user accounts.

    “In MyPAY we have found a strong local partner. Together we will make social payments a reality – for the very first time – in one of the last large untapped markets. Building a presence in Myanmar is aligned with our strategy to be a global leader in social payments, given Myanmar’s prominence as a large domestic market and receive market for global remittances,” said Vince Tallent, Chairman and CEO of fastacash.

    We see tremendous opportunity for both peer-to-peer and person-to-merchant payments in Myanmar. Together with fastacash, MyPAY is going to introduce a mobile money app, compliant with Myanmar law, to make payments easier for consumers and merchants in Myanmar. With fastacash’s technology, we are able to leverage social networks such as MySQUAR. Together, we are empowering a connected market where ninety percent of people are unbanked and underserved by traditional financial institutions,” said Nicolas Nguyen, CEO of MyPAY.

    Myanmar is one of Asia’s fastest emerging economies, with its gross domestic product (GDP) rising 8.5 percent in FY2014 (IMF), and forecast to rise 7.7 percent in FY2015. McKinsey estimates the country’s economy will quadruple from US$45 billion in 2014 to US$200 billion by 2030. Economic growth in the country is expected to be tied to demographic trends and mobile and social penetration.

    The country’s young population, with 47% under the age of 24, are expected to drive the consumption of mobile and social networks.

    Myanmar’s mobile penetration is estimated to rise from 10.5% in 2014 to 57% in 2016, boosted by the entry of foreign telecom companies. Mobile is expected to present a huge opportunity for Myanmar; by 2016 nearly 15 million people will be able to access the internet, mainly via their mobile devices. As only 4.8% of citizens have a bank account, a large opportunity exists for mobile money services.

    fastacash has live services in India, Indonesia, Russia, Singapore and Vietnam. Through partnerships with banks, money transfer operators, mobile network operators and social networks, it builds social payment capabilities within their services and mobile applications. Its partners include financial institutions such as DBS Bank (Singapore), Axis Bank (India), Oxigen Wallet (India), Techcombank (Vietnam), Doku (Indonesia), MOBI.Dengi (Russia), as well as VISA Europe.

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  • Myanmar’s MySQUAR raises $2.6m in London listing

    Myanmar’s MySQUAR raises $2.6m in London listing

    MySQUAR, Myanmar’s only social media platform in the local language, has raised $2.6 million, at a valuation of $27.8 million, through an initial public offering on London’s Aim.

    MySQUAR was looking to raise $2.5 million, via a London listing, at a valuation of $25 million. The report had quoted Shashi Fernando, Chief Executive Officer at Yonder and Beyond, the Australia listed global technology accelerator, that has 3 per cent equity holdings in MySQUAR,

    AIM is the London Stock Exchange’s international market for smaller growing companies. A wide range of businesses including early stage, venture capital backed as well as more established companies join AIM seeking access to growth capital.

    MySQUAR said it would use the funds to expand its product line, moving into news, information, financial and payment services in the future to augment its social networking and gaming products

    In August last year, MySQUAR had unveiled its free mobile messaging app – MyChat – built solely for Myanmar.

    The successful listing comes off the back of MySQUAR’s significant growth within the Myanmar telecoms market. Its MyChat app was recently ranked fifth in Google Play’s top free applications store, with over 680,000 accounts on the instant messaging app. By the end of the year, the company expects the figure to have treble to 1.5 million users.

    “What we are seeing in Myanmar is a social revolution and it is gaining traction quickly,” said Eric Schaer, chief executive of MySQUAR. “A SIM card was hundreds of dollars three years ago and now is just US$1.50, making it easily attainable for the population. Although little over 30 per cent of Myanmar’s 60 million population has a handset, the penetration rate is expected to hit 100 per cent in the next five years. We are in a fantastic position to capitalise on this growth and the market has confirmed our position,” he added in a statement.

    Post the listing, Yonder & Beyond’s 3% is worth $845,000, which represents a value up-lift of 24% in four months. “MySQUAR is one of the most exciting companies within our portfolio and this listing provides us with a significant return on our investment,” said Shashi Fernando, chief executive of Yonder and Beyond, in a statement. “It continues to grow at a rapid rate. Through its listing on AIM, they are allowing investors to access the Myanmar market, as well as enabling MySQUAR access to growth capital,” he added.

    MySQUAR intends to expand its product line and Schaer said he was confident that the company would break-even in 2018. The firm intends to move into news, information, financial and payment services in the future to augment its social networking and gaming products.

    By 2019, MySQUAR expects to capture and keep 30 per cent of Myanmar’s connected population continuing its rapid growth trajectory.

    Last year, techinasia, had an interesting post, where MySQAR’s erstwhile Canadian founder claimed she was ousted in a ‘hostile takeover’ of the social media platform. The report further quoted a blogpost titled, ‘When investors turn into bullies’, where Rita Nguyen, founder and former CEO of MySQUAR, had said that her co-founder Nguyen Quynh Anh, and she were “locked out” of the company. Another report, in local media, had said that Rita Nguyen, who had been named one of Forbes’ Asia Power Businesswomen, had taken down this blog post, on June 17, a week after she had uploaded the same.

    Earlier this year, Myanmar granted mobile licenses to Telenor and Ooredoo after these two companies were selected last year following a bidding process, becoming the first foreign mobile phone companies to operate in the country. Their rollout of services has seen Myanmar’s low mobile phone penetration rise rapidly over the last few months.

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  • Burmese social network MySQUAR eyes Aim flotation

    Burmese social network MySQUAR eyes Aim flotation

    The future is bright in Myanmar, even if it is not as Orange as the French telecoms company might have liked. It is more a lurid yellow with puce-tinted characters in local Burmese script, according to MySQUAR, the social media business which hopes to float on the Alternative Investment Market in a fortnight.

    The Burmese start-up is raising about £2m to piggyback off the impressive growth in mobile communication in Myanmar and build a local-language business of messaging applications and online games. Nearly 700,000 Burmese citizens already use its MyChat app, and that could be more than 1m by December if all goes to plan.

    MySQUAR is just one of the many small businesses hoping to cash in on Myanmar’s economic revival after its release from half a century of military rule and censorship. Five years ago a fraction of a per cent of Myanmar’s population — of which nearly half are under the age of 24 — had access to a mobile phone. Now Myanmar’s economy is growing at about 8 per cent a year, say analysts, and by the end of 2015 a third could have phones.

    The government hopes that by 2016 more than three-quarters of the country will have network coverage. Two years ago it invited the likes of Orange and Vodafone to tender for licences to roll out mobile services across the country. Norway’s Telenor and Ooredoo of Qatar won the tender and this month Telenor said it had already picked up 6.4m customers and was “unexpectedly” in profit. The average revenue per user is more than four times greater than in India or Pakistan, it added.

    “We are sitting on top of all that telecom expansion,” says Eric Schaer, MySQUAR’s chief executive, a US-born former banker and citizen of Comoros who lives in both Vietnam and Singapore.

    Yes MySquar has rivals, including Facebook, but while the literacy rate is extremely high, very few people speak or write English. MySQUAR is the only one allowing Burmese people to chat in the local lingo, says Mr Schaer.

    That said, Myanmar is still a very poor, largely rural country without access to road, rail or reliable electricity supplies where less than 10 per cent of the people have bank accounts. Democracy is young, cronyism prevails and the country is split by factions and disputes over land rights. Companies are not governed by the norms that western investors are used to and the cost of doing business is unpredictable and high. In August, for example, Telenor reported evidence of the use of child labour by suppliers.

    Mr Schaer says stoutly “[business] has all been quite straightforward. We have not had challenges.” So far.

    Broker Beaufort Securities has discounted assumed cash flows to reach a value of about £23m for the company. But MySQUAR’s services are free for now while it builds its customer base and it will not start to charge users for add-on services or advertisers for space for a while. MySQUAR will not generate cash for months, if not years. The profits may come after that. Then again, they may not.

    MySQUAR is a start-up in the real sense of the word and high risk. The purple prose is beguiling, but the company’s future may be more black and white.

    Financiers are forever repackaging centuries’ old products and services, and rebranding them with the latest buzzword. Often it is just a way of charging another layer of fees for another layer of intermediation. Today’s buzzword is “crowdfunding”. It bestows a wow factor on the most pedestrian capital raising.

    Or so Darwin Strategic, majority owned by Henderson, hopes. It claims to have pioneered crowdfunding for public companies. Its second customer is Aim-quoted Kea Petroleum, the New Zealand explorer trying to raise £3m from private investors at 1p a share via Darwin’s PrimaryBid.com. Anand Sambasivan, Darwin’s boss, says PrimaryBid is not brokering any old equity placing. The difference is that retail investors can bid for shares directly from companies. “We fill the gap in bank lending for small companies and give retail investors access to share placings,” he says.

    Kea’s shares tell their own tale. They have fallen from above 30p in under a year and are trading at 0.875p in the market. Paying as much as 1p smacks of that old saying, “a fool and his money are soon parted”.

     

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