Myanmar stitching a new economy

Booming industry: Employees working at a garment factory in the Shwe Pyi Thar industrial zone in Yangon. Myanmar’s garment making industry is expanding fast as the country pins its hopes on industrialisation to reshape its economy. —AFP

YANGON: Wearing an expression of intense concentration, Myanmar garment worker Htet Myat Nyein stitches jackets bound for wealthy foreign high streets, part of a booming industry fuelling much of the country’s modernisation drive.

“I learned to sew at this factory,” she says, her soft voice almost lost in the clatter of sewing machines at the Shweyi Zabe factory on the fast-industrialising outskirts of Yangon.