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This chapter examines the telecommunications sector in Myanmar. Strict adherence to ideology and commercial self-interest, in the guises of “national security” and military-controlled state-enterprises, has confined access to telecommunications to a few. A World Bank report of 1995 notes the general lack of private access to physical infrastructure, including telecommunications, and how this skews foreign investment towards joint ventures with the state. Public telecom facilities, fixed and wireless, continue to be state-owned and controlled by Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). Under the 1989 State-Owned Economic Enterprise Law, part of the Open Door policy, telecommunication facilities and services were the sole right of the government, but government-private sector joint ventures were permitted. Other laws which impact the telecom sector are the Computer Science Development Law enacted in 1996 and the Electronic Transaction Law which took effect in April 2004.

This chapter discusses telecommunication developments in Vietnam. Decades of war and under-investment left Vietnam's telecommunications underdeveloped, and because it is deemed a strategic industry, private-sector participation has been limited or prohibited. In 1992 Vietnam adopted a new constitution enshrining the principle of economic innovation or renovation called doi moi. The first significant step in telecommunications was taken in 1988 when Vietnam signed a revenue-sharing Business Cooperation Contract (BCC) with OTC, now part of Telstra (Australia), to build satellite earth stations for international traffic. By the turn of the century, BCCs had brought in over US$1.5 billion of investment, but these were confined to basic services in fixed and mobile. To boost telephone density from 2005 the Ministry of Posts and Telematics (MPT) unveiled a development blueprint which called for investment of up to US$600 million per year over that period in the telecommunications and information technology sectors.

The idea of business investments assembled as part of an investment portfolio is a powerful one with ramifications that extend to the pricing of individual investments. The author describes the mean-variance framework, as outlined by Harvey Markowitz in the 1950s, as establishing the basis for an entire class of Modern Portfolio Theory models. The author then outlines the relationship between portfolio models and the Basic Pricing Equation, the most familiar of the portfolio models, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, including a recursive derivation of the CAPM that is somewhat closer to actual household behavior than the typical presentation, and the Roll critique of CAPM and similar models, and extends that critique noting that equity in 99% of firms do not fit into portfolio models. Portfolio models are then tested to see if they provide a practical basis for valuing three actual firms.