Cambodia beckons as a rich market

Viettel Global aims to rake in $330 million revenue and $85.8 million profits in 2012 from operating Metfone network in Cambodia. Last year, the firm counted $256.4 million revenue from this market, continuing its status as a leading telco in this country from just $150 million of its initial investment.

Besides military-run telecom group Viettel, Phuong Nam and Hoang Anh Gia Lai are weighty investors in this market with total committed capital of around $100 million each.

By the end of March 2012, Vietnam’s total outbound investment in Cambodia exceeded $2.2 billion committed into 100 projects. Cambodia ranks second in attracting Vietnamese outbound investment out of 50 countries and territories with Vietnamese investors’ footprints, whereas Vietnam is the third largest investor in Cambodia.

“Vietnamese investment into Cambodia spiked especially from the second part of 2009 up to present with a doubling of projects and investment capital seeing a five-fold increase against 2009,” said State Bank governor Nguyen Van Binh in a meeting with Vietnamese investors in Cambodia this late March.

From late 2011 on, scores of local banks like BIDV, MB, Sacombank and SHB rushed to open branch offices in Cambodia with total registered capital surpassing $100 million.

Most recently, in late March 2012 Cavifoods inaugurated its first-phase rice processing plant in Phnom Penh. The plant’s second phase is now in the development pipeline.

A fertiliser production plan invested by IDCC - a subsidiary of the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam in Cambodia - with an annual capacity of 350,000 tonnes will be commissioned this year.

For its part, Cambodia pumped $53 million into 11 investment projects in Vietnam by end of May 2012.

“Vietnam and Cambodia are common in taking fostering economic cooperation as a long-term and sustainable fundament to cement comprehensive ties between the two countries,” said Minister of Planning and Investment Bui Quang Vinh.

Association of Vietnamese Investors in Cambodia chairman Tran Bac Ha expected the dialogue mechanism between investor community and Cambodian and Vietnamese governments would soon be established to help firms remove impediments when doing business in each other’s country.