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From WSJ’s Davos blog:

Standard Chartered PLC remains bullish on the major Asian economies of India and China, encouraged by the policy outlook for the two countries this year, the bank’s Asia chief executive said.

The U.K.-based lender, which focuses almost exclusively on Asia and emerging economies, also sees European rivals retreating from those markets as they are beset with challenges at home, Standard Chartered Asia Chief Executive Jaspal Bindra said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

In India last year, Standard Chartered confronted a range of challenges including slowing growth, rising interest rates and a depreciating rupee. Revenue from the bank’s India unit fell by 12% in the first half of 2011 and by the “mid-teens” in the third quarter, Group Finance Director Richard Meddings said earlier.

Mr. Bindra blamed higher interest rates. “Interest rates went up almost 400 basis points in a short period, and it is very difficult, if you do wholesale business with the best clients in the country, to pass on a 400 basis point increase at any one time.”

But the central bank’s surprise move to loosen monetary policy this week has sent a “clear signal” that there will be no further rate hikes and the government is shifting its focus to promoting growth, Mr. Bindra said.

The Reserve Bank of India Tuesday held its key lending rate steady for a second straight policy meeting but cut the minimum cash reserve requirement by 0.50 percentage point to ease liquidity.

“The government has for a long time shown a huge preference to manage inflation through monetary policy,” he said. But following the RBI cut, “I think we will see a more balanced approach.”

Mr. Bindra also said that the recent “normalization” of the rupee exchange rate — it is up 6% against the dollar so far this year after declining 15.1% in 2011 — will encourage renewed foreign investment.

In China, Mr. Bindra believes authorities will be successful in guiding the economy to a “soft landing” ahead of a leadership transition at the end of the year.

“The priority for all of 2012 and beyond is going to be ‘how do we keep things stable,’ as they have this transition of power at the top,” he said, adding that not just the top political leadership, but also the leaders of major financial institutions and regulators are all due to be reshuffled. “It is quite a massive-scale change of power.”

As European banks regroup and retreat from Asia, Standard Chartered sees an opening. The trend is especially pronounced in industries including shipping and commodities and in markets like Indonesia and India where dollar liquidity is scarce, he said.

“It gives us an opportunity to scale up market share, and second, it gives us a little bit of pricing advantage.”

– Aaron Back. Follow him on Twitter @AaronBack.

In recent years, China has re-invigorated its support for leading state-owned enterprises in sectors it considers important to “economic security,” explicitly looking to foster globally competitive national champions.

In 2009, China announced that by 2020 it would reduce carbon intensity 40% from 2005 levels.

The government has also focused on foreign trade as a major vehicle for economic growth.

The restructuring of the economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold increase in GDP since 1978.

The disparities between the two sectors have combined to form an economic-cultural-social gap between the rural and urban areas, which is a major division in Chinese society.

The technological level and quality standards of its industry as a whole are still fairly low, notwithstanding a marked change since 2000, spurred in part by foreign investment.

China’s increasing integration with the international economy and its growing efforts to use market forces to govern the domestic allocation of goods have exacerbated this problem.

The growth in both outbound investment from, and inbound investment to, China reflects the nation’s rising economic power and attractiveness as an investment destination.

” Although the figure is already “quite amazing,” the volume is “not large enough” considering China’s economic growth and local companies’ expanding demand for international opportunities, Shen said.

It also aims to sell more than 15 million of the most fuel-efficient vehicles in the world each year by then.

Although China is still a developing country with a relatively low per capita income, it has experienced tremendous economic growth since the late 1970s.

Since the late 1970s, China has decollectivized agriculture, yielding tremendous gains in production.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and wheat and a major producer of sweet potatoes, sorghum, millet, barley, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and potatoes.

China ranks first in world production of red meat (including beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork).

Growing domestic demand beginning in the mid-1990s, however, has forced the nation to import increasing quantities of petroleum.

China’s leading export minerals are tungsten, antimony, tin, magnesium, molybdenum, mercury, manganese, barite, and salt.

Major industrial products are textiles, chemicals, fertilizers, machinery (especially for agriculture), processed foods, iron and steel, building materials, plastics, toys, and electronics.

Brick, tile, cement, and food-processing plants are found in almost every province.

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Davos: StanChart Bullish on China, India

China’s growth rate is slowing but it is still a good investment for a long-term play. Jim McCaughan, CEO of Principal Global Investors, tells Deborah Kan investors should look to the U.S. for the near term.

After keeping its currency tightly linked to the US dollar for years, China in July 2005 revalued its currency by 2 % against the US dollar and moved to an exchange rate system that references a basket of currencies.

In 2006, China announced that by 2010 it would decrease energy intensity 20% from 2005 levels.

China is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with an average growth rate of 10% for the past 30 years.

Nevertheless, key bottlenecks continue to constrain growth.

The disparities between the two sectors have combined to form an economic-cultural-social gap between the rural and urban areas, which is a major division in Chinese society.

China has acquired some highly sophisticated production facilities through trade and also has built a number of advanced engineering plants capable of manufacturing an increasing range of sophisticated equipment, including nuclear weapons and satellites, but most of its industrial output still comes from relatively ill-equipped factories.

The market-oriented reforms China has implemented over the past two decades have unleashed individual initiative and entrepreneurship, whilst retaining state domination of the economy.

The ministry made the announcements during a press conference held in Xiamen on the upcoming United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Investment Forum and the 14th China International Fair for Investment and Trade.

In this period the average annual growth rate stood at more than 50 percent.

It also aims to sell more than 15 million of the most fuel-efficient vehicles in the world each year by then.

China’s challenge in the early 21st century will be to balance its highly centralized political system with an increasingly decentralized economic system.

Despite initial gains in farmers’ incomes in the early 1980s, taxes and fees have increasingly made farming an unprofitable occupation, and because the state owns all land farmers have at times been easily evicted when croplands are sought by developers.

Except for the oasis farming in Xinjiang and Qinghai, some irrigated areas in Inner Mongolia and Gansu, and sheltered valleys in Tibet, agricultural production is restricted to the east.

Horses, donkeys, and mules are work animals in the north, while oxen and water buffalo are used for plowing chiefly in the south.

There are also extensive iron-ore deposits; the largest mines are at Anshan and Benxi, in Liaoning province.

There are also deposits of vanadium, magnetite, copper, fluorite, nickel, asbestos, phosphate rock, pyrite, and sulfur.

China’s exploitation of its high-sulfur coal resources has resulted in massive pollution.

Other leading ports are rail termini, such as Lüshun (formerly Port Arthur, the port of Dalian), on the South Manchuria RR; and Qingdao, on the line from Jinan.

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Investor: Take U.S. for Near Term, China for Long Term

Thai police led Atris Hussein, a 48 year-old Lebanese man with suspected links to a Hezbollah to search a commercial building in Samut Sakhon province, adjacent to the capital, where they discovered chemical substances which could be used in making explosives.

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Terrorism in Thailand: the Swedish connection

On the demand side, the importance of external demand can be fully appreciated by recognizing that the bulk of inventories in Thailand are primarily inputs and finished goods for the export-oriented manufacturing. In the fourth quarter of 2009, for example, net exports and the change in inventories contributed 44 percent of the quarterly growth.
The continuation of certain government policies, especially the pension to the elderly and free education should also support higher consumption levels for the poor. The longer-term goal of reducing reliance on external demand will take time, especially given political uncertainties that hinder the government’s ability to implement not only its investment program but also needed structural reforms.

Chinese investment funds, Middle Eastern petrodollars — there is a huge amount of new money being channeled into the Asian capital markets.
The 2009 market rally reflects the perception that valuations are about long-term potential, and that political crises in Thailand rarely have a dramatic impact on the fundamentals of the economy. If we look at the EV/EBITDA multiples of the oil and gas sector, for example, valuations are still low compared to regional peers : this is partly a reflection of regulatory risks and political instability in Thailand.

The Center for International Trade Studies at the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce expects Thai export to grow by only 6.8 to 13.7 percent with a total value of 259 billion U.S. dollars due to several risk factors.

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Chamber of Commerce Predicts Export Growth for 2012 between 6.8 to 13.7%

At the end of 2009, real GDP was back at pre-crisis levels, as measured in seasonally adjusted terms.
The continuation of certain government policies, especially the pension to the elderly and free education should also support higher consumption levels for the poor. The longer-term goal of reducing reliance on external demand will take time, especially given political uncertainties that hinder the government’s ability to implement not only its investment program but also needed structural reforms.

Lagging the chart was paper and printing materials, with a -1.3% TSR for 2009, professional services with a meager 4.5% gain, and property funds up 31%.The Shareholder Scorecard, published annually by the Bangkok Post and the AWR Lloyd-PYI group, is an analysis of the two factors that underlie investor returns — dividends and capital gains.
In part, this may reflect the greater volatility in earnings in smaller companies.
Introduction The modern Thai Capital Market traces its origins back to the early 1960s. In 1961 Thailand implemented its first five-year National Economic and Social Development Plan to support the promotion of economic growth and stability as well as to develop the Kingdom’s standard of living. Following upon this, the Second National Economic and Social Development Plan (1967-1971) then proposed for the first time that an orderly securities market be established in order to mobilize additional capital for national economic development.

The creation of Thailand’s first officially sanctioned and regulated securities market was initially proposed as part of the Second National Economic and Social Development Plan (1967-1971). In outlining its proposal for the creation of a supervised securities market, the Second National Development Plan stressed that the market’s most important role would be to mobilize funds to support Thailand’s industrialization and economic development.

Your start-up may have crossed the threshold to viability. Now, the tough part begins. At the onset of 2012, many start-up executives around the world are sticking their copy of Lean Start-Up on the shelf, leaning back, and bemoaning the fact that they have a new set of challenges ahead of them. Although there is a plethora of advice now being given about how to find product-market fit for your fledging start-up, there’s a dirty little secret out there: Once you’ve achieved product-market fit, the hard work really begins. Scaling is hard. After three or four years of jamming on your start-up, you’ve finally crossed a few million in revenue, gotten north of 10-20 employees, and it’s all starting to click. Now the pressure really begins. Your employees start doing what I call “phantom equity math” (if this company were worth a billion dollars, I’d become a multimillionare!), your VCs shift you in their mental models from “too early to tell” to “high return potential” and your spouse starts asking about when all that hard work is going to really pay off. Yet, the hard scaling challenges and decisions that will enable true value creation, not just interim progress, are all ahead of you. Here are four of the top ones that I see start-ups wrestle with once they start seeing their initial revenue projections finally come to fruition: 1. Product strategy: Stay focused vs broaden the footprint The initial product is working well and now the question is how broad a product strategy should you pursue? If you think the total available market (TAM) for the existing product is large enough to satisfy yours and your investor’s ambitions, stay focused. But, typically, the allure of pursuing the bigger win draws founders into ambitious efforts to broaden their product footprint through organic development efforts or even M&A. My partner, Chip Hazard , likes to refer to the broadening efforts as the “lily-pad strategy”: Focus on jumping on to a lily pad next to you rather than across the entire pond. By pursuing natural adjacencies, a company can increase its TAM—ideally by leveraging existing customers (meet their needs more broadly), channels (given them more things to sell), or products (extend the current prodcut footprint with natural adjacent add-ons). I’m often surprised that companies don’t think through the basics of competitive strategy when evaluating these adjacent opportunities. At the risk of getting some eye rolls for evoking Michael Porter , I encourage start-up CEOs to think carefully about the new lily pad’s competitive intensity, entrance threats, threats of substitute products, as well as the power of suppliers and customers when evaluating the adjacent opportunities. 2. Financial strategy: Exit vs raise additional capital Once things are working well, there is a magnetic power that demands pouring more fuel onto the fire. If the customer acquisition costs (CAC) are proving out to be $1 and the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) are $2, why not raise millions of dollars to acquire more customers? Obviously, it’s not that easy a decision. Raising capital can be a hugely distracting, draining process, and the dilution implications, as well as the choice of investors, has deep repercussions on your future options. On the other hand, pursuing an early exit can be appealing, particularly if the entrepreneur has never had a win before, but there are many difficult considerations here as well, which I touch on in a blog post ( Walking Away From Liquidity ) as does Roger Ehrenberg ( To Sell or Not To Sell ). 3. Human capital strategy: Hire grownups vs stay young There is a certain charm and many benefits to the founding team sticking together and scaling with the start-up. The culture remains true to the founding core, the young talented employees get growth opportunities, and there’s an appeal to minimizing the disruption that outsiders bring. Yet, frequently, the talented founding team that gets you to the point of scaling is not the right team to lead the scaling process. I refer to the three stages of a start-up’s life as “the jungle,” “the dirt road,” and “the highway”. The team that is skilled at hacking its way through the jungle is often not as well-suited to accelerate rapidly once a dirt road has been discovered. Yet when more senior, experienced executives arrive, preserving the founding culture, and maintaining alignment is critical. The best companies build teams for scale early on (e.g., hiring great VPs who can be both effective players and coaches as their department grows) and work hard to select for cultural fit (Google’s top recruiter, Mike Junge, had a great interview on hiring best practices in PE Hub, Why It Pays To Be Nice ). 4. Founder’s dilemma: Bring in a professional CEO? Ultimately, one of the biggest decisions a scaling young company makes is: Who should be the CEO? The founder may be one of the uniquely talented individuals who can scale from the jungle all the way through the highway, but more often than not, a senior, professional CEO is hired to help take the company to the next level. This decision is truly make or break. It rests on the founder’s desires as well as the board’s confidence in his or her ability to transition from a product-centric, pre-product-market fit world to a sales-and-marketing execution-centric, post product-market-fit world. Investors would always prefer to see the founder make that transition, but if the skillset isn’t there, having an orderly transition with open communication is key. HBS Professor Noam Wasserman has written a series of cases on this topic that show some of the do’s and don’ts of navigating this transition. It’s never an easy one to embark on. Each of these decisions can be gut-wrenching, bet the company moves. There’s a nasty image I hear used in the boardroom about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If things are going well, you want to let them evolve naturally and achieve some measure of victory, albeit a small one. This may mean sticking with a founding leadership team, a niche product strategy, and selling early. Why should each of these decisions sound limiting? Because great entrepreneurs are competitive, ambitious types who attract ambitious management teams, advisors, and investors. There’s a natural allure to moving aggressively to scale once the initial product-market fit assumptions become validated. Just scale wisely. Going from $1 million to $10 million in revenue is no easier than achieving that initial $1 million. And getting to $100 million and beyond, well now you’re really in the rarified air that gets the people around you—and sets expectations soaring higher.

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Scaling A Business Is Hard

The Apple Investor is a daily report from SAI.

Sign up here to receive it by email . AAPL Still Battling XOM For Market Cap King Last week was good to Apple, which closed above $400 for the first time since early November. But the stock gained little ground in its running battle with Exxon Mobil for the market cap championship, as the rise in crude prices has pushed the oil giant up as well. Catalysts for Apple include iPhone upgrade cycles and adoption; update to the iPad in early 2012; continued market share growth of the Mac business line; penetration in China and emerging markets; the evolution and potential re-conception of Apple TV ; and platforms such as Siri, mobile advertising (iAd), books and publishing, gaming, mapping and social ( Ping ).

Shares of Apple trade at 8.9x Enterprise Value / Trailing Twelve Months Free Cash Flow (including long-term marketable securities). Will Apple Make The Perfect TV While Google TV Continues To Disappoint? (The Perfection Paradox) The single biggest reason Google TV didn’t work was it didn’t solve any of the biggest shortcomings of our living room television viewing experience. Apple, meanwhile, will approach the market with the aim of making TV simple again, by making the “perfect” TV. Henry Blodget at Business Insider says that TV users just want to press “on” and watch what they want to watch .

That’s it.

Steve Jobs probably figured out how to allow TV users to press “on” and then say, “The Jets game,” or “Addams Family” or “The next Sopranos episode” or “our Hawaii vacation videos” and have the TV just play them. If Apple can do that, they will have a massive hit. iOS Mobile Devices Accounted For Over 90% Of December Mobile Retail Sales (RichRelevance) iPads and iPhones accounted for over 92% of online retail sales not originating from a desktop device for December, according to RichRelevance, easily beating out Android .

Shoppers on Apple devices were also willing to spend more, with an average order value of $123 versus Android’s $101 (that’s 19% more). Mobile shopping is still a drop in the bucket compared to desktop shopping, with just 3.7% of total online retail dollars spent in the U.S. Goes to show that the browsing experience is key to mobile commerce. Why Isn’t Safari Growing Like Chrome? ( TechCrunch ) Remember Safari ? While Google’s Chrome has skyrocketed from obscurity in 2008 to over 25% last month, Apple’s web browser lingers somewhere between 5-8%. But Why? Windows ? But Safari has actually been available for Windows quite a bit longer than Chrome has been.

Speed? Chrome is know for being the fastest browser available in terms of both page rendering and JavaScript performance. Promotion? Or lack thereof. Google does quite a bit of promotion for its browser. However, Safari being bundled by default with iTunes should have helped it gain massive Windows market share. Extensions? Safari has had them as well since mid-2010.

That said, Chrome’s extensions are better and much more plentiful. Neglect? Apple is more inclined to throw resources at native work rather than web work. Of course, this could all change if devices like the iPad really are the future of general purpose computing. A New Era Is Coming For Apple In 2012 (paidContent) Apple will remain the most compelling story in tech not just because of the iPhone and its cousin, the iPad, but because of the immense pressure on CEO Tim Cook and Apple’s management team to live up to the standard set by a legend.

This quarter will be the first full quarter that Cook and his lieutenants will have been in charge of Apple. And the company has never been stronger, and Cook has been auditioning for this job for several years.

The company could make or break mobile payments this year and revolutionize the way we watch TV. It’s hard to imagine Apple losing steam in 2012. Get Ready For Apple’s Monster Quarter, And The Stock To Soar (Seeking Alpha) Apple is unique among America’s mega caps due to the company’s ongoing rates of revenue and earnings growth.

That said, the rate of Apple’s share price appreciation has fallen behind the rate of earnings growth over the past four quarters. Despite the 83% growth in earnings per share in fiscal 2011, at Apple’s closing price of $403.33 last week, the share price has risen only 25% year-over-year.

There’s a disconnect between the perceived limits to Apple’s continuing strong growth and the reality of the company’s potential for growth. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook . Join the conversation about this story » See Also: Here’s Why The Apple TV Might Be Awesome And Google TV Will Continue To Suck…

THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Stagnant Shares Are No Reason To Ignore In Microsoft THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Why Google+ Is Now A Must For Businesses

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THE APPLE INVESTOR: 2012 Will Usher In A New Era For Apple (AAPL)

Is this digital version of the Yellow Pages too powerful to pass up? Or is Google AdWords a total waste of time?

Remember the Yellow Pages? It was a phone book in which advertisers paid money for ad space. People who needed something–a plumber, a pizza, a podiatrist–would open the Yellow Pages and search for the category they were interested in. Then they would peruse the listings and call the business that seemed most promising. When we all relied on the Yellow Pages to show us the way to the closest shoe repair shop, nearly every business had a listing or an ad–and consumers “let their fingers do the walking.”

Today, of course, lots of us simply do a Google search to find what we need–yet not every business places an ad in this virtual Yellow Pages. So it is time for every business owner to understand the basics, and that’s why I’ve brought in the experts. They’re Howie Jacobson and Kristie McDonald, co-authors of Google AdWords for Dummies, and partners at the online marketing firm, Vitruvian. I asked them to give us the inside scoop on today’s digital equivalent of the Yellow Pages.

Give us the quick lowdown on what AdWords looks like from the advertiser’s point of view.
Advertisers write short ads, 130 characters maximum. They bid on “keywords,” or the search terms that their prospects are typing into the Google search box. With every search, Google runs an auction and displays the ads that it predicts will bring in the most revenue. For example: let’s say you have a business selling and servicing horse tack: saddles, bridles, reins, etc. You might bid on the following keywords:

Horse tack
Horse bridle
Horse blanket
Horse saddle

When a searcher types one of these search terms, or a close variation (horse blankets, or Western saddle, for example), your ad would appear on the search results page if you were one of the top 11 competitors for that particular auction. (Check out what those results would look like here.)

So does the AdWords “auction” work like a regular auction?
No, it doesn’t. Normal auctions simply pay attention to the bids. Google invented a simple-yet-ingenious twist on the auction that catapulted AdWords past its early pay-per-click competitors. Here’s the twist: the actual click price is a function of your maximum bid and the quality of your ad. Ads that generate more clicks get a volume discount, so to speak. So if you write ads that generate twice as many clicks than a competitor’s ad, you can pay half as much per click and still come out on top of them in the auction.

This twist created a brilliant win-win-win scenario: Google wins because it sells advertising space for top dollar. Since Google only gets paid when someone clicks an ad, it’s in its interest to favor the more “click-worthy” ads, not just the ads with the highest keyword bids. The advertiser wins because they don’t have to pay for ads that don’t work. And the searchers win because they get to see relevant advertising, as decided by them, not Google or the advertiser.

Is AdWords competitive for advertisers?
It most certainly is! Like the Yellow Pages; all your competitors are gathered in one spot, jumping up and down, saying, “Pick me! Pick me!” And since better ads are cheaper, your savvy competitors are constantly testing new ads to find the best ones.

The amount that a business can afford to pay for a click depends on how much that click is worth once the visitor lands on their website. So businesses that focus on improving their website-conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become leads or customers), profit per sale, and number of repeat sales and referrals, almost always come out victorious in AdWords. And the fact that AdWords is highly competitive is good news; it means that advertisers are making money there. Remember, Google handles close to 4 billion searches per day. You would expect such a large and hungry traffic stream to attract fierce competition.

Let’s talk about small business. How can AdWords help a small business?
We recommend AdWords to small businesses for two reasons: traffic, and testing. Many small businesses can use AdWords to generate all the leads and sales they need, at margins they are happy with. And AdWords is the world’s easiest testing engine; you can test new ad text and landing pages and let Google tell you which ones work the best. Many start-ups have saved a lot of money by testing their offers and messaging with AdWords before jumping right into production and sales. Other businesses have doubled sales by improving an online sales letter using AdWords traffic.

What’s the catch?
Virtually any business can benefit from AdWords testing. Not every business will make money on the AdWords traffic, although you can’t know without trying. But there’s a caveat: since AdWords is competitive and fairly complex, you need to be willing to invest time to learn the system. You also need to have enough spare cash to run conclusive tests.

How much cash are we talking?
Since every market has different keywords, and keywords all have different click prices, it’s impossible to estimate costs without knowing something about your business. Google provides a free keyword tool that shows you estimated cost per click data for different keywords, as well as the number of searches per month. So, you can use these numbers as a starting point, but you’ll need to buy some traffic to get actual cost per click data, as opposed to an estimated average.

And before you start, you should consider that it’s useless to spend money on AdWords unless you have enough to first fund an adequate test. The average cost per click for horse blanket is $2.13. Let’s say you have a new website devoted to selling your horse blankets, and you want to know how well it does. If you send 10 visitors to that page and none of them buy, should you give up? Of course not; 10 people is too small a sample size to infer any trends. You’d want a couple of hundred visitors, at least. And if you were testing two variations of the page, you’d want to send that many to each page.

So for a typical landing page split test with two variations, you’ll need enough money to buy 500 clicks. If your keyword is horse blanket, that’s $1065. If you can’t afford to spend that much without expecting the money back in sales, then you shouldn’t be running that test.

That’s probably a little complicated for some mom-and-pop shops. What about outsourcing the use of AdWords?
AdWords is a complicated beast, as we’ve said, and it changes all the time. Unless you or a member of your team devotes several hours a week to keeping up with all the new rules, features, and strategies, you’re going to get eaten up by the pros. Outsourcing your AdWords advertising has two benefits: It saves time that you could spend on other areas of your business, and it increases the effectiveness of your advertising, giving you a stronger ability to compete.

That said, you have to be careful about who you outsource to and what they do with the data. Since AdWords data is so valuable to your marketing and business strategy development, make sure the AdWords agency you choose understands marketing and not just the technical aspects of AdWords management. And make sure that they will share the data with you in an actionable form that you agree on.

So what will your first steps be? If you have a story to share, we’d love to hear it!

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Why Aren’t You Using Google AdWords?

Burma’s military-backed, but nominally civilian, government has surprised critics with its political and economic reforms this past year. The liberal moves resulted in a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December. During her trip, VOA’s Daniel Schearf spoke with residents of the main city, Rangoon, about what they think of the changes, so far.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s December visit to Burma was both a reward and encouragement for authorities after a year of unexpected reforms.

President Thein Sein, despite being a former general, is slowly moving away from decades of military rule and economic problems.

Although still made up of former officers, his government ordered the release of hundreds of political prisoners, relaxed media censorship and held separate talks with ethnic rebel groups and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Nobel Prize winner was released from 15 years of house arrest in 2010 and plans to run for parliament in next year’s by-election.

Meeting with Clinton at the home where she was detained, Aung San Suu Kyi sounded optimistic about the direction of the country.

“This will be the beginning of a new future for all of us, provided we can maintain it. And, we hope to be able to do so,” she said.

Burma was once the star of Southeast Asia but, much like Rangoon’s British colonial-era buildings, crumbled under military rule. Just months ago most people in Burma were too afraid to talk openly about politics, especially to journalists, who are rarely allowed into the country.

But, since March, the new government’s moves toward reform are encouraging some to speak up.

Riding past Rangoon’s colonial Customs House, trishaw driver Maung Than Zaw says, despite reform efforts, he can barely make ends meet. Things have not gotten better for ordinary people like him;  it is getting worse, he says, adding that is difficult to earn four or five dollars per day.

Rangoon fruit vendor Mi Mi Aye says she worries about being arrested, but still wants to criticize the so-called civilian government. She says nothing has changed, the new government is just the same people as before.

There are others who say the economy and the government are improving.

At the Golden Palace jewelry store, in Rangoon’s Chinatown, a crowd of shoppers press against a long glass display case, clamoring for attention from sales staff.

Owner Aung Kyaw Win has one of Burma’s most famous chains of gold and gem stores.  He says business is good and would be even better if European Union and U.S. sanctions were lifted.

“I think our government, economically, they are trying to change a lot. We are sincerely hoping, because we heard from the newspaper and we can able to see they are changing.”

The government is slowly reducing cumbersome regulations and monopolies that crippled the economy. One key step is unifying the exchange rate to curb corruption. The official rate is seven kyat to the dollar. The actual market rate is 100 times higher.

A money counting machine flips through a stack of Burma’s currency.  At this currency exchange center in Rangoon, U.S. dollars are traded for bricks of kyat.

Many in Burma, like Lwin Aung Zaw, are paid in American dollars, but they are not legally allowed to possess foreign currency without a permit and have to exchange their salaries every month or risk jail.

He says they can exchange foreign currency at these counters. But, according to the law, they are not legally allowed to have foreign money.  He believes it would be better if authorities changed this rule.

At a tea shop in Rangoon a young man rolls dough balls into thin pancakes, called roti, and fries them in oil.

Tea shops are a center of Rangoon social life, where people meet for a snack, but also to talk business and about how Burma is changing. Taxi driver Tint Lwin says, like most people, he is focused more on earning a living than politics.

He says he sees a lot of developments.  Because he is a taxi driver he can only comment from a driver’s point of view. The roads are getting better, he says, but they still have heavy traffic jams.

Retired civil servant Thaung Htwe says he hopes Clinton’s visit will spur more reforms. He hopes that Burma will be developed more in the future.  And he  says by having good relations with the United States, they might see development in all sectors; economy, society, politics and so on.

Despite a more open environment, not everyone welcomes foreign journalists asking questions.

In a Rangoon market, an older man approaches VOA and demands we stop video taping, saying we need permission from local authorities.

“I don’t like it.  We don’t like it…Yeah, this [is] the poor area.  Not for news,” he says.  He recommends we go to a wealthier area to show how rich Burma is.

But locals in the market argue back that they are poor.

Although hopes are raised that Burma’s economy may revive and the country may finally turn the corner to democracy the road ahead is still uncertain. Rights groups point out military abuses continue in ethnic areas, including murder and rape.

And, despite reforms so far, there are still hundreds of political prisoners behind bars which authorities have yet to acknowledge.

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Burma’s Year of Change Raises Hopes