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Laos high-speed rail: China’s ticket to southeast Asia and beyond
It looks like Laos, China’s tiny landlocked southern neighbour, is about to find out whether sharing a border with China is a good thing. Laos has two things China needs – natural resources such as potash and hydropower, and access to Thailand’s large and growing consumer market.
Perhaps that is why China is so keen to provide a $7.2bn loan to the small communist country for a long-awaited controversial high-speed rail project between the two. Continue reading »
Thailand helps Laos to bond market
Communist Laos has taken a further step from obscurity into a globalised world with plans for its first ever international bond issue.
The Bt1.5bn ($49.2m) issue will be in Thai baht – as a result of a key change in Thailand’s bond issuance regulations, which says more about Thailand’s ambition to be seen as a regional power than about Laos’s fledging pseudo-capitalist economy. Continue reading »
For months, residents in an affluent part of Pattaya, a seaside resort town near Bangkok, assumed that the three foreign men who lived in a nearby luxury villa ran an import-export business, because, as one resident told local media, people “who looked like businessmen” came and went throughout the day.
It was not the sort of export-import the locals envisaged, as they learned when the villa became the target of one of Thailand’s biggest-ever drug busts in late November. Continue reading »
Laos: pressing ahead with the Mekong dam despite concerns
By Jake Maxwell Watts and Nguyen Phuong Linh
As construction starts on a controversial hydropower project in Laos, it becomes clearer by the day that this poor and underdeveloped country is likely to place its ambition to be the “battery of south-east Asia” above any cost to the environment – and that price will be considerable. Continue reading »
WTO: what’s in it for Laos?
By Gwen Robinson and Jake Maxwell Watts
Its fledgling – and tiny – stock market may only have two companies listed, the population barely amounts to 6.5m and the economy is invariably described as “sleepy”. But Laos is poised to realise a 15-year effort to join the World Trade Organisation, amid robust economic growth of 8 to 9 per cent annually over the last few years and a surge in exports and imports. Continue reading »
Even Mobius hearts Laos
Laos-listed stocks have only existed for just over 24 hours – but already they have a high-profile fan: none other than emerging market guru Mark Mobius.
Laos has a lot of things going for it – proximity to big emerging markets like Vietnam, Thailand, and China; rich natural resources; huge hydro-power potential; and – would you believe it – Asean’s fastest growing economy. Continue reading »
Laos stocks soar on debut – yes, both of them
It’s not quite Wall Street, but traders clocking off after their first day at the office on Dongphosy-Dongdok 450 Years Road in Vientiane have much cause to stop off for a celebratory pint of Beer Lao at one of the city’s many fine drinking holes.
Investors who snapped up shares listed on the newest bourse in south east Asia’s smallest economy have been thoroughly rewarded for their pluckiness – if the results of the first day of trading in Lao shares is anything to go by. Continue reading »
Laos: contemplating capitalism
Communist Laos will dip its toes into capitalist shores, when it launches the world’s newest bourse in Vientiane on Tuesday.
The exchange starts with just two state-owned stocks on the board: EDL Generation, which is controlled by the state-owned power company Electricite du Laos, and Banque Pour Le Commerce Exterieur Lao (BCEL), a state-owned bank. Continue reading »
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