Phnom Penh (FN), Dec. 16 – Entrepreneurship Development Fund is a public trust fund under the Ministry of Economy and Finance, aiming to find and support potential entrepreneurs in Cambodia who are working to address the bottlenecks and scale the business to the next level.
Following the fund strategic research on several agricultural products to meet new export market and interview with local entrepreneurs, Hunty Group is considered one of the inspiring entrepreneurs with the conscience and genuine business intention and technical capabilities to protect the value of Cambodian agricultural products.
This founder has over 30 years of experience abroad, specifically in East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East market. When they first visited Cambodia in 2013, the Group established its footprint here by starting with the cold storage and processing facilities investment costing about $15 million. Generally accepting, the industry experts acknowledge that this facility is a key infrastructure to address the strategic bottleneck in the agricultural value chain, especially in emerging economies like Cambodia. However, despite being based on advanced technology and broadening technical expertise, cold chain storage investment alone cannot guarantee a successful model to uplift current Cambodia's agricultural challenges to attain premium pricing than today's market price. Related ecosystem issues, including logistics costs, power and other ongoing problems, will continue to take up most business margins. Therefore, Hunty Group's long-term strategic plan is to establish the "Cambodian National Agricultural Industrial Park" in Kampong Seila district, Preah Sihanouk province, which is a strategic location within the green belt of the provincial master plan and in line with the multi-purpose development goal of the Royal Government of Cambodia for this coastal and deep-sea port city.
Chea Kok Hong, who is the secretariat director of Entrepreneurship Development Fund and also the project director of Project Management Unit for SHV Multi-Purpose Model Special Economic Zone Master Plan, sat down with Sophy, who is the general manager of the Hunty Group, on their business motive, vision, business model, and contribution to the Cambodian agriculture products value and the feasibility of the project make Cambodia become a truly agricultural exporter country.
1.What motivated you to start a business in Cambodia?
On 11 January 2018, Chinese premier Li Keqiang held talks with Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen in Phnom Penh. After the meeting, the Joint Communiqué between the government of the Republic of China and the government of the Kingdom of Cambodia was issued. The communiqué stated that China would strengthen cooperation with Cambodia in agriculture and other fields, "vigorously promote agricultural cooperation, jointly prepare Cambodian modern agricultural development plans, build agricultural cooperation demonstration parks and agricultural products deep processing parks, promote the development of Cambodian agricultural products processing, storage and logistics, and extend the agricultural industry chain".
The whole industry chain model, the "going abroad" model, the land lease substituting model, the acquisition and merger model, and the establishment of overseas agricultural parks are the main models for Chinese agricultural enterprises to 'Go Global'. Thus, We, the Hunty Group, saw the opportunity to become the first mover in this field. We love to upscale Cambodian agricultural goods to the next level and bring new food and meat processing export modalities to this lovely nation based on our 30 years of experience in this sector.
2.How important is your project to Cambodian agricultural goods?
First, the large-scale industries of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the trend of becoming a major export country necessarily require cold chain warehousing facilities. Cambodia is a traditional agricultural country, and agriculture is the largest pillar industry of the Cambodian economy. The agricultural population accounts for 85% of the total population, 78% of the national labour force, and 6.3 million hectares of arable land. Hence, there is a growth in demand for large-scale cold storage in the local market of the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Let's take Hunty Cold Storage as an example. It is located in Sen Sok District, Hanoi Road, Phnom Penh. Since being built in 2016, it covers an area of 2-hectare land and is currently the largest cold storage opened to the outside business in Cambodia. In 2020, the 10,000-ton cold storage capacity was already saturated, and local customers' demand for cold storage kept increasing year by year.
Our standard charge is just $1 per cubic meter per day. However, the benefit to farmers is enormous in many ways. By storing at our cold storage and processing facilities, our farmers can avoid the awkward situation of agricultural products in peak seasons and shortages in the off-season. They are free to choose when to make a correct market sale according to market conditions. They can also carry out in-depth processing to produce other industrialization and high value-added processing by-products.
3.What do you think is the strategic direction of agricultural development in Cambodia?
I think four key directions are, Standardization, Scale, Industrialization, and Refinement. Hunty Group believes in government support, especially MAFF, MEF, and other related ministerial agencies, to break through the current bottleneck altogether. We also work with the local investment consulting firm (Continent Asset Management) to facilitate with all related ecosystem stakeholders and to learn more about the local context to develop this project to be much more cost-effective, a role model in the country and best fit with Cambodia's ongoing development situation.
Thus, our group development plan is to establish a well-functioning industrial processing park for agricultural products; meanwhile, Hunty Group has already accelerated its construction at the Kampong Seila site and applied for relevant licenses and policy supports to ensure smooth operation to meet the high expectation of our international customers. We aim to initiate an upcoming project like the Free Trade Zone for agricultural products. With large-scale cold storage anchoring at the center, the group will extend vertically upwards to create full-featured tropical fruit storage and processing export, deep processing of agricultural products and aquatic products, frozen meat food processing, frozen food supply and other online marketable trading platforms.
Our up and running park service will include production, processing, refrigeration transactions, import and export trade, logistics and distribution, e-commerce, transaction information, food safety testing, agricultural and commercial cooperation, international fruits and agricultural products (Cambodian meat and aquatic products) frozen food. More importantly, the group will bring in the leading enterprises to integrate with the exchange center, which will try its best to cover domestic and foreign famous, special and premium foods, and become the largest and most complete professional cold chain and food market distribution center in Cambodia and the Southeast Peninsula.
Additionally, the park will comprehensively enhance the regional brand image and the international reputation of the Cambodian agriculture product, attract well-known food processing operators and traders who are able to comply with the food safety industry to settle in, establish agricultural and food science and technology, national museums for agricultural products, industrial exchange and training center, and ultimately being the largest e-commerce and trading center for agricultural and food safety products in Asia-Pacific.
Through the complexity of this supply chain integration, the project will become the economic hub of the whole province and even the entire country that promotes from traditional agricultural economy to a direction with advanced technology, high productivity, and diversification of farming products, thereby driving the export trade flow of each participated enterprise in the park and making Cambodia a truly world-class large agricultural export country.
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