Financing Telecommunications Projects in Asia: A Promising Regulatory Perspective

Asia's telecommunications market has long been viewed as lucrative and fast growing. As the benefits of a competitive telecommunications market become apparent, many Asian governments recognize that global corporations require, and in fact demand, state-of-the-art telecommunications infrastructure. After several years of strong growth, however, the severe economic crisis that affected all industry segments in Asia caused investors to pause and reevaluate the risks involved in financing infrastructure projects. Despite the recent Asian economic crisis, the overall picture for Asian telecommunications infrastructure projects remains promising.

Asian governments continue to liberalize their regulatory schemes, thus reducing regulatory and political risks to investors. This Article focuses on the regulatory risk involved in financing any telecommunications project. It provides country-specific analyses of countries with more developed, "investor friendly" regulatory schemes and countries with less developed, but potentially favorable regulatory schemes based on the regulatory principles previously identified.