A total of 114 companies from 21 countries are operating in the Thilawa Special Economic Zone (SEZ), with an investment amount of US$2190.790 million, said Vice-Senior General Soe Win, Chairman of the Central Committee on Myanmar Special Economic Zone, Deputy Chairman of the State Administration Council (SAC), at the meeting of the Central Committee on Myanmar Special Economic Zone held on October 12.
Thilawa SEZ is a zone where business is being carried out successfully, as well as a zone with good reputation among the countries in the region. In order for foreign investors to continue to invest in the Thilawa SEZ in an orderly manner and to promote new companies and investments for current investors, he would like to order the relevant ministries to make the necessary cooperation in order for the businesses to run smoothly and quickly, he said.
In addition, the Thilawa SEZ covers an area of 667.275 hectares and is divided into Zone (A) and Zone (B) as a free zone and promotion zone, and export business and domestic import substitution business are being managed. There are currently 114 companies operating from 21 countries that invest, and the investment amount is US$2190.790 million, which has 3.6 percent of the country's gross domestic product in 2022-2023 FY and 1 percent of the national export amount and 3 percent of the private export amount in 2022, according to the reports, said the vice chairman of SAC.
Likewise, if we look at the 2023-2024 FY operations of Thilawa SEZ, the export amount in the four months from April to July is US$54.945 million and imports amounted to US$162.653 million, totaling US$217.598 million. A total of 22 billion kyats were collected for all taxes. Since it is a period of four months, we want to continue to make efforts to improve the collection of trade and taxes in this fiscal year. In addition, three companies in the free zone and one company from the promotion zone in Thilawa SEZ, which are manufacturing sports equipment, motor vehicle wire and circuit board manufacturing, plastic machine parts and food and drinks could not be started due to various reasons, but the activities have already started due to the organizing efforts of the management committee, he said.
In addition to this, regarding the unusual incident in the Thilawa SEZ, the employees of a company investing in the zone misused the licenses of another company that had an import license to import illegal goods and the authorities were able to identify and arrest the illegal importation of goods worth more than US$2 million so we need to carry out the necessary inspections and supervision to prevent this kind of incident from happening again. I would like to order that the parent companies must be paid the investment loans of the companies in the special economic zones and the cases to be canceled from the foreign loan list be processed in accordance with the procedures. In addition, the new companies that will come to invest using foreign currency need to continue to use the additional investment money of existing companies in US dollars as well as in foreign currencies that have already been approved by the Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank and the Central Bank of Myanmar. As the Central Bank of Myanmar is still negotiating with official currency exchange of other partner countries, it will need to inform the relevant companies, he said.
