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Myanmar's first tourism stock starts trading in Singapore

Bloomberg Published on Fri, Jan 05, 2018 / 8:57 AM GMT+8

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(Jan 5): Thousands of tourists have floated in a hot-air balloon over Myanmar’s historic Bagan plains dotted with more than 2,200 ancient Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries. Chances are they rode one of Memories Group’s inflatables.

The company, the largest operator of balloons in the area, will start trading under the MEGL ticker on the Singapore stock exchange on Friday. Memories Group is a 47.6%-owned unit of Burmese conglomerate Yoma Strategic Holdings, which spun off its Myanmar tourism assets via a reverse takeover of SHC Capital Asia. It raised $10.7 million in a placement of 42.6 million new shares and 7.4 million vendor shares at $0.25 per piece, which ended on Jan 3.

“Tourism is one of the lowest hanging fruits that will have exponential growth and we felt it was the right time to actually have an independent, dedicated platform to develop the tourism business,” Serge Pun, founder of Yoma Strategic and executive chairman in both companies, said in an interview in Singapore. His son, Melvyn Pun, an ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker, is the chief executive officer of Yoma.