Description:
"We achieved impressive growth in both our farm advisory and irrigation businesses this quarter. Our
product pipeline of newly designed irrigation products, agronomy services and financial services is
strong. This quarter we’ve focused on improving both the unit economics of providing our services and
increasing the levels of earned income from those services. We’re confident we’ll reach our milestone of
118,000 new customers by 30 June 2018.
Our irrigation business is still highly seasonal with Q1 traditionally being our slowest quarter. This year the
monsoon season lasted longer than normal, which resulted in sales of only 3,432 units this quarter, still
representing a 66 percent, YoY increase. 60 percent of sales are now our micro-irrigation sprinklers and
drip systems. A new rent-to-own option was introduced to boost sales of the Lotus solar water pump.
Farm Advisory Services advised 25,437 unique farmers in Q1, a dramatic year-on-year increase of 99
percent. This is driven by a big increase in our engagement with groups of farmers in thousands of village
demonstrations across 21 rice growing townships. Across our target markets we’ve achieved an 18 percent
market penetration already. Our digital channels – designed to lower the unit economics of providing
agronomy advice to our customers – added 1,900 users to its fertilizer management SMS service. Proximity Finance – our business unit offering loan products specifically designed for small farmers -
now serves 79,838 rural clients. New client acquisition has been slowed by funding constraints related
to the Myanmar MFI industry’s ability to hedge dollar denominated debt over the past several quarters.
In September, we were able to close a US$5.3 million debt instrument with a local bank. The loan
portfolio continues to diversify with only 35 percent of loans dispersed to rice farmers. Repayment rates
on loans are very strong (PAR30 is 0.32 percent). Market penetration includes 1,702 villages across 56
townships..."
Source/publisher:
Proximity Designs
Date of Publication:
2017-09-30
Date of entry:
2019-08-05
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Countries:
Myanmar
Language:
English
Local URL:
Format:
pdf
Size:
766.57 KB
Resource Type:
text
Text quality:
- Good