YANGON, Myanmar — Honey Mya Win didn’t have to look far to discover the tech potential for Myanmar. A 26-year-old former telecom engineer at Huawei, she was directly involved in configuring mobile phone towers and base station controllers that expanded 3G access to the once reclusive nation.
“My team was actually the one connecting the country,” she said. “That made me think: Maybe I should get in on this internet business.”
That was a few years ago — when mobile penetration was still hovering at single digits in Myanmar.
Today, more than 80 percent of the population is digitally connected through smartphones, according to Hootsuite. For her part, Win has traded in the engineering job to start an online freelancing platform, Chate Sat.