When a 100-metre-long section of a Phnom Penh garment factory crumpled in on itself like a cheap pup tent, Sen Sok district officials promised an investigation. …
The results of that investigation, which was to have taken place more than a year ago, in March 2012, were never made public, and officials at the time refused to release the names of those who owned the land the building sat on or the firm responsible for its construction. …
As one long-time real estate consultant put it: “It’s really waiting for the disasters to happen.”
Yesterday morning, on the sidelines of a conference on national industrial relations, a Ministry of Labor official reiterated Social Affairs Minister Ith Sam Heng promise to inspect all of Cambodia’s factories. …
According to the consultant, foreign construction companies who are accustomed to high levels of oversight often maintain those standards when operating in Cambodia. …
“You may have a system in place, you may have a procedure in place, but it may all be hollow. It may just be a show,” he continued. “So even if there is a department in the construction department or the ministry – at the minute there isn’t one – but even if there is one, it’s hard to tell how this country really enforces all that construction safety.”
Van Thol, vice president of the Building and Wood Workers Trade Union Federation of Cambodia (BWTUC), said that while he believes there are inspectors, he doesn’t necessarily believe they do their job. …
“Licensed construction companies are hired by a factory to do its construction, but those licensed firms rent out other, smaller, unlicensed construction firms to build it, and they don’t really follow the standards,” he said. …
The National Television of Cambodia and the Mass Communication Organization of Thailand (MCOT) on Tuesday signed a television cooperation agreement, focusing on the exchange of TV programs and information.
The deal was inked between director general of the National Television of Cambodia Kem Gunawadh and MCOT’s director general Anek Perm Vongsent under the presence of Cambodia’s Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith. …
He [Khieu Kanharith] said that it was very important to exchange information. As the border conflict between the two countries has not been solved, both sides must broadcast only factual information and must avoid any provocative news. …
Getting reliable statistical data remains a challenge for Cambodia’s government, as a lack of cooporation among the ministries and corruption still distort what is reality.
Industry insiders say this is a problem, especially as reliable data are the base of reference when the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) economic community is drafting its policies.
Analysts say data from the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) under the Ministry of Planning, such as the Economic Census of Cambodia, would be reliable, but statistics published by other ministries were not. …
“There still remains some uncertainty around the accuracy of the subscriber statistics coming out of the Cambodian telecom market,” Peter Evans wrote in his 2012 report about the Kingdom’s telecommunications sector. Therefore, he assumed a possible deviation of 15 to 20 per cent about his projection data. …
“When any nation falls behind in this process, it means that the region will not complete the organisation of its statistics. Government statistics are the base reference when the ASEAN Economic Community, the [East Asia Summit] and the ASEAN Economic ministers draft their policies,” a report on Capacity Building for Statisticians in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar from the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) said in 2009. “A lack of qualification of statisticians hinders the international comparability of industrial statistics.” …
Two-way trade between Vietnam and Cambodia in the first four months of the year reached nearly US$1.3 billion, a 10 per cent rise over the same period last year.
According to the Vietnam Trade Office in Cambodia, Vietnam’s exports to Cambodia fetched over $1 billion while its imports were $253 million in the four-month period. …
Vietnam’s investment in Cambodia has increased significantly in the last three years, but a mechanism to encourage and oversee investments in prioritized sectors is needed, according to diplomatic sources.
Tan Nguyen Tien, head of the economic section at the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh, said Vietnam’s investments in Cambodia quadrupled from $566 million in 41 projects in 2010 to $2.5 billion last year. …
Tien said Vietnam Airlines’ direct services between the two countries and Viettel’s telecom service in Cambodia have helped boost Vietnamese investment in that country. …
There are also four projects in the energy sector with a total investment of nearly $800 million, five in finance-banking with $250 million, one telecom project capitalized at $150 million, and a civil aviation project worth $100 million.
Vietnamese FDI in Cambodia is expected to top $4 billion by 2015, and trade between the countries to increase from $3 billion last year to $5 billion by 2015. …
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 holding up a concrete-floored storage area at mezzanine height between two building had given way. In addition to the two dead, nine workers were injured, three of them severely, by falling pieces of concrete, Mr. Loo said. …
The beauty business in the Kingdom is growing rapidly as incomes are rising and the middle-class is growing, industry insiders told the Post yesterday.
In the first three months of this year, the Kingdom imported cosmetic products worth $9.9 million, an increase of 130 per cent compared with the same period last year, import data from the Ministry of Commerce showed. …
According to industry insiders, young Cambodians open to Korean culture and lifestyle are a main driver for the development of the industry. …
Deutsche Bank and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) have poured millions of dollars into Vietnamese rubber companies operating in Cambodia that have engaged in illegal logging and forced evictions of local farmers, the environmental rights group Global Witness says in a new report released today.
Drawing on satellite images, government and corporate documents, field visits and exchanges with firms involved, Global Witness deduced that the IFC currently has $14.95 million stake in a Vietnamese-based investment fund investing in Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), a Vietnamese rubber firm listed on the London Stock Exchange. The organization also says that Deutsche Bank holds another $4.5 million worth of HAGL shares, along with $3.3 million in shares of Dong Phu, a member of the state-owned Vietnamese Rubber Group (VRG). …
Combined, Global Witness says, HAGL and VRG alone now control at least 180,000 hectares of rubber plantations in Cambodia.
“HAGL and VRG’s ultimate ownership of these [subsidiary] companies lies behind an intricate web of shell companies,” the Global Witness report says. “This allows them to disguise the fact that they have massively exceeded Cambodia’s legal limit on land holdings,” which sets the ceiling for any on person at 10,000 hectares. …
Energy Minister Pongsak Ruktapongpisal has given the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (Egat) the green light to proceed with a plan to build coal-powered plants in Myanmar and Cambodia – providing Thailand with 10,000 megawatts of electricity. Egat has also been instructed to negotiate the purchase of nuclear power from China in order to bring down the cost of electricity. …
In addition, the Energy Ministry has also been discussing the possibility of investing in a coal-powered plant in Cambodia to produce 4,000MW of electricity. Thailand hopes that buying power from Cambodia will keep the domestic cost of electricity from exceeding Bt6 per unit. Egat also plans to go ahead with its coal-powered project in Krabi once it has reached an “understanding” with residents and businesses protesting against the deal. …
In addition to investing in coal-operated power plants from neighbouring countries, Egat is also looking at investing in hydro-electric power projects within the region. …
The first three-day Koh Kong Investment and Trade Fair 2013 kicked off on Saturday, promoting trade and investment in the southern provinces of Cambodia with neighbours Thailand and Vietnam. …
“The [fair] is aimed at promoting trade and development in Koh Kong province and other border provinces in the southern region of the country, which is to further enlarge trade and the economy between Cambodian provinces, and with the provinces of Thailand and Vietnam that are boardering Cambodia in this southern region,” said Cham Prasidh, Cambodia’s Minister of Commerce. …
Bilateral trade between Cambodia and neighbouring Vietnam rose more than 10 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, data from the Vietnam Embassy in Phnom Penh showed.
Officials said cross-border trade facilitation by both countries significantly contributed to the growth. But they said the growth rate slowed down a little, as more competition developed from other importing countries.
The data showed total two-way-trade was worth $1.013 billion in the first quarter of the year, a 10.26 per cent increase from $918.694 million in the same period last year. …
The breakdown figure showed that in the first quarter of 2013, Cambodia’s total exports to Vietnam were valued at $221,153,942, a 9.9 per cent increase from $201,198,500 in the same period of 2012. The value of Vietnam’s exports to Cambodia reached $791,857,900, up 10.36 per cent from $717,495,323 in the same period last year. …
Cambodia mainly exported aquatic products and seafood, corn, dried tobacco, rubber latex, paddy rice and cashew nuts to Vietnam. The main products from Vietnam were all kinds of steel and made-from-steel products, confectionery, cereal products, garments, rubber products, vegetables and fruits, paper, metal products, machinery products, transportation vehicles and spare parts. …
I am really optimistic about the rise in bilateral trade volume which will certainly pave the way for the target of $5 billion set by the two governments by 2015.” [per Ministry of Industry Mines and Energy director general Meng Saktheara]
The data showed that total bilateral trade between both countries was worth $3.316 billion last year compared to $2.836 billion in the same period of 2011 – an increase of 17 per cent. …
Cambodia has lost almost a quarter of its forests in the past 40 years due to rapid development and China’s demand for timber, according to a new report released yesterday by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on the Greater Mekong Region.
Looking at five countries in the Mekong Region- Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam- WWF has calculated, using data from both satellite analysis and U.N. country reports, that almost a third of the region’s forests have been destroyed. Titled Ecosystems in the Greater Mekong Region, the report says that the presence of primary forest is “extremely low” in Cambodia, and only approximately 10 million hectares of forest cover remain in the county.
According to Agence Kampuchea Presse, Prime Minister Hun Sen said this week that 1.5 million hectares of forest cover has been used for economic land concessions, while there remains 9.5 million hectares of forest cover left in the country. However since 1.2 million hectares of these concessions have been allocated for rubber plantations, Mr. Hun Sen said that these land grants, in fact constitute forest cover …
Cambodia and Uruguay on Thursday signed an agreement on visa exemption for diplomatic and official passport holders, aiming at creating close contacts among the two countries’ diplomats, officials and business people, officials said.
The deal was inked here between Long Visalo, secretary of state at Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Gerardo Prato Rodriguez, Malaysia-based Ambassador of Uruguay to Cambodia. …
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has raised its forecast of global paddy production in 2012 by about 1.5 million tonnes to 730 million tonnes (487 million tonnes, milled). …
The scaling up of production mainly concerned Asian countries, in particular Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Viet Nam, but also western African States, such as Guinea, Mali and Senegal. …
Cambodian milled rice is becoming more popular throughout Asia, particularly in Malaysia, which is the number one importer of milled rice from the Kingdom. …
Hean Vanhorn, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and director of the single-window secretariat for facilitating milled rice exports, said though Malaysia ranked highest for milled rice exports, Cambodian could further capitalise on Malaysian demand for fragrant rice. …
But Cambodia also still faces challenges in managing the use of different seeds grown in different areas, he said, adding that officials could not always control the quantity of these unspecified seeds. …
The Cambodian government is targeting to increase rice exports to 1 million tons by 2015, and is investing in rice processing facilities and providing credits to farmers. …
Laos is considering a single-visa scheme with its neighbours Thailand and Cambodia to promote balanced development in the subregion, officials said.
The Lao government will hold talks with Cambodia, possibly at the end of this month, to learn from Phnom Penh’s experience in this matter, a senior official at the consular department in Vientiane told the Vientiane Times last Sunday. …
Minister of Tourism Thong Khon told the Post yesterday that a Laos-Thailand-Cambodia single visa was discussed during the Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Co-operation Strategy (ACMECS) meeting last month in Laos. …
So far, only Thailand and Cambodia have launched the single-entry visa in December last year. It is available at Thai and Cambodian embassies.
With the number of cars on Cambodia’s roads growing at a consistent pace, high-end automotive distributors are jockeying for a foothold in the market, but they are not the only ones who stand to benefit from Cambodia’s splurge on cars. Working on the sidelines, the Kingdom’s small field of insurance firms is turning a quiet profit in a once dormant industry.
Revenues generated from automotive insurance premiums grew 23.88% to $5.18m through the first nine months of 2012 compared to the same period last year, according to data from the General Insurance Association of Cambodia (GIAC). …
Group Lease Plc (GL), the SET-listed motorcycle leasing firm, is planning to expand into Laos and Vietnam next year after a successful move into Cambodia last year. …
Mitsuji Konoshita, the chairman and chief executive, said both Laos and Vietnam are promising markets, while the company plans to launch its business in Indonesia before the inauguration of the Asean Economic Community in 2016. …
GL has operated in Cambodia for a year and built up a portfolio of 2,000 leased motorcycles without any non-performing loans thanks to a prudent approach in a new market. …
As night falls thousands of weary workers stream from textile factories that fan out across Phnom Penh’s outskirts.
The clothing industry’s desire for cheap labour having created an abundance of jobs but as the number of international clothes companies tapping into Cambodia’s workforce grows, so does anger at the low wages and tough conditions that come with such employment in the global garment industry. …
Overwork, malnutrition and poor ventilation are to blame for staff fainting in factories since 2010, according to Moeun Tola, program manager at the Community Legal Education Centre, which provides advocacy for workers. …
Land prices in Preah Siahnouk province have risen slightly, by 5 to 10 per cent in early 2013, despite increasing numbers of tourists who have visited Cambodia and travelled to the province.
Cheng Kheng, director of the CPL real estate company and president of Cambodian Valuers and Estate Agents Association, said that land trading in Preah Sihanouk in early 2013 has grown between 5 to 10 per cent this year, but some areas have advanced and some have only slightly increased. …
CAMBODIA’S indirect trade and investments with India are possibly worth almost five times more than its direct economic activities, a situation deemed “unfavourable” to the country, an industry expert said yesterday.
Direct trade and investments between the two countries hit a record $112 million last year, 20 per cent more than 2011, said Indian Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) President, Debasish Pattnaik.
But indirect activities, conducted through a third-party, “could be easily worth around $500 million,” said Manish Singhal, assistant secretary-general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). …
While India also largely trades indirectly with countries like Myanmar and Vietnam, Cambodia’s ratio of direct versus indirect activities is “very, very unfavourable”, Singhal said.
Without a middleman, there is “greater possibility of business growth”, he said, because importing costs can drop eight to 15 per cent. Also, when problems arise, having direct connections with the exporter would enable better solutions, because “the middleman is not your friend”, he added.
Such indirect activities, said Dinesh Pattnaik, is one reason why India’s direct trade and investments with Cambodia remain low, compared to that with ASEAN, valued currently at about $80 billion. …
