Vientiane (FN), Oct. 11 – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet stated that the inclusion of Cambodia in the Financial Time FDI Intelligence Standout Watchlist 2024 solidifies its attractiveness to global investors

The premier spoke on Friday (Oct 11) during the 2024 ASEAN Business & Investment Summit in Vientiane, Laos.

Samdech Thipadei added that over the last decades, Cambodia has consistently been among the top least developed countries, recipients of FDI.

“The kingdom's inclusion in the Financial Time FDI Intelligence Standout Watchlist 2024, ranking among the world's top 50 FDI destinations, where this solidifies its attractiveness to global investors, a number speaks for itself. From September 2023 to September 2024, Cambodia's FDI inflow amounted to USD 7.5 billion, which marked an increase of USD 4.7 billion, or 161 per cent compared to the same period between 2022 and 2023,” Samdech Thipadei underscored.

Samdech Thipadei Hun Manet stated that beyond benefits derived from regional agreement within ASEAN, Cambodia has tried to further expand and diversify market and export opportunities. In 2020 and 2022, Cambodia signed bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with China and the Republic of Korea, respectively. These bilateral FTAs have leveraged further and levelled the liberalisation and other commitments in participating countries have committed under the ASEAN-China, ASEAN-ROK and RCEP, and therefore providing a much larger opportunities to benefit from. In 2023, Cambodia also signed with the UAE, a comprehensive economic partnership agreement that opened up a new gateway for Cambodian products toward the Middle East region.

On the occasion, Samdech Thipadei added that besides the benefits from aforementioned agreements, Cambodia is still a benefactor from a wider duty-free, quota-free, preferential market access for least developed countries under the WTO network, which includes the GSP scheme that provides at least 97 per cent duty-free market access, namely through the EU's EBA and UK's developing countries trading scheme and other GSP schemes from China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, Canada and to name a few.
=FRESH NEWS