Made here, owned there

At the end of a well-paved road just past the city’s airport sits a cluster of factories. Each one is barely discernible from the next – grey concrete walls and blue aluminium roofs. But one factory in the lot, MAG (Cambodia), is different. In a country saturated with foreign investment, it’s 100 per cent locally owned. … Helped by EU and US trade preferences, Cambodia’s garment industry has grown from about one per cent of GDP in the early 1990s to close to 10 per cent of GDP today. Despite this boom, which has provided hundreds of thousands of steady jobs, Cambodian ownership has never taken off. Coinciding with favourable foreign investment conditions, local ownership percentages have remained flat, much to the detriment of an industry that wants to reinvest its profits domestically. In 2003, just 7.1 per cent of factories were owned by Cambodians, according to figures from the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC). Now, a decade on, little has changed. Fifty-two of GMAC’s 609 members make up 8.5 per cent of the country’s garment factory ownership. The figure, according to GMAC, is probably even lower, as many are joint partnerships. …

 Daniel de Carteret
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/business/made-here-owned-there