A ceiling at a small factory making shoes on the outskirts of the capital of Cambodia collapsed on Thursday morning, killing at least two workers and underlining global worries about factory safety in poor countries.
Ken Loo, the secretary general of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia, said that steel beams... continue
Cambodian export values increased more than 21 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, and officials said the rise was a positive sign for the Kingdom’s economic growth. …
According to the Ministry of Commerce’s export data obtained by the Post yesterday, exports reached over $1.65 billion in the first three month period this year, up from the goods exported during the same period last year, up from the goods exported during the same period last year, valued at $1.36 billion. …
The World Bank recently predicted that Cambodia’s GDP growth would reach 7.0 per cent for this year, up 0.3 percentage points from its last projection in December. …
Cambodia’s construction sector is facing a massive labor shortage due to a recent boom in construction projects throughout the country and workers migrating en masse to Thailand in search of higher wages.
In 2012, the construction sector expanded rapidly with the total value of approved projects totaling $2.11 billion, a 72 percent increase on the previous year’s figures, according to data from the Ministry of Land Management. …
But construction companies are in some cases having to wait months while they search for an able work force and economics say, will have to increase wages if they are to compete with jobs on offer over the border in Thailand. …
Peter Brimble, senior country economist for the Asian Development Bank, said that the construction sector is steadily planning a big role in Cambodia’s economy, which is expected to grow by at least 7.2 percent this year. Cambodia’s construction currently accounts for 6 percent of GDP and the International Monetary Fund said in January that Cambodia’s construction sector “is picking up thanks to the real estate rebound, in part fueled by rapid credit growth.” …
U.S. listed gambling firm Entertainment Gaming Asia Inc. (EGA) will next month hold a grand opening for its second casino on the Thai-Cambodia border, the company said.
In a statement issued on Monday from Hong Kong, it said that Dreamworld Club in Poipet, which has been partially open since March 28, would be holding its grand opening on May 9.
According to the statement, EGA has invested $7.5 million in the new project, which houses 300 gaming machines in a nearly-1,500-square-meter-site. …
EGA opened its first Cambodian gaming venue, Dreamworld Palin in May, and that operation made the company 1.3 million in revenue in the last three months of 2012. …
Cambodia had granted operating licenses to 606 new companies in the first quarter of this year, a 33 percent decrease compared with the 904 firms at the same period last year, the Commerce Ministry’s report showed Tuesday. …
Yim Rom, an official at the ministry’s statistics and planning department, said the drop in new business registration was due to the ministry’s restrictions on registration procedures by thoroughly examining proposed companies’ business plans in order to ensure fair competition and to avoid duplicated trademarks. …
In the whole year of 2012, Cambodia granted operating licenses to 3,385 new firms, a 9 percent rise year-on-year, the commerce report said.
Acleda Bank, a leading commercial bank in Cambodia, on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with UnionPay International on payment services for mutual benefits, according to the bank’s statement.
Xu Luode, president of China UnionPay and vice-chairman of UnionPay International, said currently, UnionPay cards reached more than 3.5 billion, and UnionPay network has been extended to 141 countries and regions in the world. …
Internet search giant Google on Friday launched a new service that for the first time allows users to instantly translate Khmer script into other languages.
Khmer is the most recent addition to the 66-strong collection of languages between which words, sentences or whole websites can be translated back and forth in the Google Translate service, which can present the results as script or phonetically. Regional languages Lao, Vietnamese and Thai are all already available on the service.
Divon Lan, a project manager in Google’s next wave emerging countries division, who worked on the new service, said the launch had been timed as a gift to Cambodians in the week of Khmer New Year. …
According to the World Bank’s last estimate, the number of Internet users in Cambodia was less than 450,000 in 2011. But the number is likely to have grown since then with the expansion of mobile Internet services.
The Phnom Penh Municipal Court has overturned two injunctions filed against bankrupt mobile operator Mfone, saying the decision will help the court-appointed administrator in charge of Mfone’s assets pay back creditors the money they are owed. …
The court issued Eltek’s injunction in October and Huawei’s injunction in January. Eltek is seeking $3.73 million it is allegedly owed in service charges and Huawei is claiming $65 million. At a meeting with creditors on April 11, administrator Ouk Ry announced that the judges were considering dropping the injunctions to pave way for him to sell off Mfone’s assets. But Eltek’s lawyer Kouy Thunna, yesterday called the court’s order “illegal.” …
Lawyer for Huawei Aron Zheng did not respond to requests for comment, though he has said in the past that the court must provide a legal basis to any decision to drop the injunctions against Mfone. …
Officials in Ratanakkiri province are investigating the provincial coordinator for rights group Adhoc for incitement after he helped villagers organize a demonstration, ultimately canceled, against a Vietnamese rubber company in O’Yadaw district. …
Mr. [Chhay] Thy, [Adhoc's Provincial Investigator] said yesterday that he met with about 100 ethnic Jarai residents from Paknhai commune’s Lom village on Thursday morning preparing for a demonstration against Company 72. The villagers accuse the firm of encroaching on communal land and illegally exporting wood harvested on its 6000-hectare economic land concession (ELC) to Vietnam. …
Cambodian garment exports are expected to grow in 2013 with the increasing foreign investments along with focus on new market including Japan and China, according to the Garment Manufactures Association of Cambodia (GMAC). In 2012, apparel exports of Cambodia grew nine percent to US$ 4.61 billion as compared to exports worth US$ 4.24 billion in 2011. …
Singapore, the US, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand, Australia, England and India were some other countries that invested in Cambodian apparel sector in 2012. However, ongoing economic crisis in the traditional export markets such as the US and the EU coupled with numerous strikes are slowing export growth of Cambodia. …
Thailand will forge closer ties with Cambodia and other neighbouring countries to increase competency in rice trading and boost the bargaining power of Asean countries by setting up a rice-trading zone soon.
Also, Thailand will expand crop cooperation to cassava to raise farm incomes in the region. …
Thailand will help Cambodia promote its cassava under the same concept of rice trading. It will help encourage more trading of cereals, such as cassava and maize, by promoting contract farming to ensure stable incomes for farmers.
The JTC will discuss a strategy to promote bilateral trade with an emphasis on cross-border shipments, which account for 65 per cent of two-way trade value. …
Last year, two-way trade was valued at US$4.03 billion (Bt116 billion), or 0.84 per cent of Thailand’s total trade. Exports to Cambodia were worth $3.78 billion against only $249.5 million for imports from that country. …
Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temples, one of the world heritage sites, received 694,700 foreign tourists in the first quarter of this year, a 8 percent rise from the same period last year, the statistics of Siem Reap provincial tourism department showed Friday.
The top three countries visiting the temples are South Korea, China, and Vietnam. During the January-March period this year, the temples welcomed some 142,040 South Koreans, up 8 percent; 87,104 Chinese, up 77 percent; and 45,760 Vietnamese, down 39 percent. …
Last year, the temples attracted 2.06 million foreign visitors, up 28 percent year-on-year. Tourism is a main sector supporting the Cambodian economy besides the garment industry, agriculture and the real estate industry.
Despite steady economic growth in recent years, Cambodia remains one of the least-developed countries in the Asia-Pacific region and faces the challenge of diversifying its economy and moving up the production value chain, the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) said in its annual report yesterday. …
Describing Cambodia as one of the least developed countries in the region, the ESCAP report notes that only 24 percent of Cambodians have access to electricity, 64 percent to clean water and 31 percent to proper sanitation. …
But “an important concern,” according to the report, is that education in Cambodia is still in need of serious development. ESCAP said the literacy rate in Cambodia of 75 percent is still too low, particularly compared to its Asean counterparts, which range from 90 to 95 percent, except for Laos. …
When the owner of Kingsland garment factory fled the Kingdom last year, enough pressure was applied to its sourcing companies H&M and Walmart to persuade them through their intermediaries to compensate workers left jobless. Distance could no longer absolve them of responsibility.
Just like the Kingsland employees who took their protest to the US and Swedish embassies to lobby Walmart and H&M, former Mfone employees took their protest to the Thai and Singapore embassies last week to apply pressure on the parents of the failed Cambodian company. …
For Dave Welsh, country director for the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity, companies that are inextricably linked to failed organisations should also be held to account. …
“Look at the corporation as whole, not just at Mfone. Look at the corporate links in Singapore and Thailand,” Welsh said. “The analogy of the situation is H&M and Nike aren’t incorporated in Cambodia, but they are morally, if not legally, on the hook for things that happen in their factory.” …
A U.K. firm being sued by 200 Cambodian farmers over the loss of their land to two sugar plantations has defended its business dealings, claiming that the affected families were dealt with legally and were properly compensated for the loss of their properties.
Local farmers and human rights groups accuse two sugar plantations—both majority owned by Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar, a subsidiary of the KSL Group—of forcing some 400 families in Koh Kong province off their farms or out of their homes since 2006, some of them violently. …
In May 2013, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and Better Work will launch HERproject in Cambodia. HERproject links multinational companies and their factories to local NGOs to create sustainable workplace programmes that increase women’s health awareness.
The project also seeks to demonstrate the return on investment for factory-based women’s health programmes, through benefits that include increased productivity, reduced absenteeism and turnover, and improved worker-management relations. …
To support scaling the successful methodology for worker training and empowerment, Better Work will manage HERproject Cambodia, which will be implemented by an appropriate local NGO partner. …
The bilateral trade volume between Cambodia and the United States was worth about 499 million U.S. dollars in the first two months of this year, down 2 percent compared with 510 million U.S. dollars at the same period last year, the statistics of the U.S. Department of Commerce showed Tuesday.
The United States is Cambodia’s largest export destination. …
The World Bank upgraded Monday its GDP growth forecast for Cambodia to 7.0 percent for this year, up 0.3 of a percentage point from its last projection in December.
“In Cambodia, a likely stabilization in high-income country conditions should support further improvements in garment production and exports,” the bank said in explaining the upgrade. …
Cambodia’s growth last year, estimated at 7.3 percent, was “faster than expected,” the update said, adding that it was “bolstered by the strong performance of agriculture, construction and tourism and a recovery in garments.”
In a separate statement, World Bank East Asia and Pacific Vice President Axel van Trotsenburg said the region accounted for about 40 percent of global growth last year. …
After years of immersion in a vicious price war, battle weary and capital-haemorrhaging [sic] mobile operators in Cambodia’s oversaturated telecommunications sector may finally have reason to breathe a sigh of relief; 2013 might be cited as the year the tide turned. …
Tarred by legal threats, unfair competition practices, trash-talking in the media and engagement in cripplingly expensive advertising campaigns, the industry’s ugly side has reared its head on several occasions since the market started overcrowding in 2006. Yet recent and long overdue consolidations in the market have some chief executives trading their swords for confetti, handshakes and electric-light breakdancers.
With over five million subscribers, Smart is now the second-largest operator in the country behind Metfone, owned by Viettel, a military-backed Vietnamese-owned telecommunications firm. Smart plans to expand its network and operational coverage throughout Cambodia and reinvigorate investors to develop infrastructure, says [Thomas] Hundt. [CEO of the repackaged brand ‘Smart’]. All the while the merger removes interconnection fees between Hello and Smart mobile users – a blessing in a market that operators claim is under-regulated and where complaints have been filed against companies that have not paid interconnection fees. …
With the industry reduced to six active operators, experts and mobile operators agree that the two developments have birthed new life into a market that, until now, has sustained multimillion-dollar losses each year. Revenues from phone usage in the Kingdom remain low, while an infant smartphone culture yields limited capital from data plans. …
The merger followed hot on the heels of Thaicom’s announcement that its lawsuit-laden subsidiary Mfone, which had been operating in Cambodia for two decades, was insolvent. …
“I think that this had to happen… The market can now begin to move at a level with more sustainable competition finally, and in the long term we won’t see any more of these crazy price wars,” said Marc Einstein, an independent telecom analyst. “I think in a market the size of Cambodia, in terms of population and GDP [gross domestic product], you can only have three, maybe four operators for the sector to be sustainable.”…
“I would say that because of the initial rush of entrants, the equipment was improved substantially, but… now quality is definitely toward the bottom compared to Thailand or Vietnam,” Einstein said. …
At first, services improved. But as huge promotions became the industry standard, the price of a domestic call dropped to just $0.01 per minute, far below Thailand’s $0.05 to $0.06 per minute and around $0.15 per minute paid in Hong Kong. …
“The problem is that, even at six players, there is still going to be a price war at a high level of competition,” said Dimitry Bushik, chief commercial officer at Excell, one of Cambodia’s mobile operators. …
Cargos entering and leaving through Phnom Penh Autonomous Port, the kingdom’s 2nd largest port, increased by 34 percent in the first three months of this year due to rising trade activities, a senior port official said Thursday.
During the January-March period this year, the state-owned port received 24,677 twenty-foot-equivalent units, or TEUs (standard- sized containers), up 34 percent from 18,450 TEUs at the same period last year, the port’s report showed. “The rise truly reflects the country’s better economic situation,”the port’s director general Hei Bavy said, adding that main items going through the port are garments, agricultural products, construction materials, automobiles, agricultural machinery and consuming products. …
The port has seen rapid growth in recent years. To meet the increasing demand of shipment, in January, the port inaugurated a new container terminal with a total capacity of 120,000 TEUs per year. The new terminal was built under Chinese soft loan of 28.2 million U.S. dollars. …
