Kingdom factory goes for the gold

Cambodian garment makers are filling orders for the 2012 London Olympics in what insiders say is the first time the country has supplied the Games. ShenZhou International Group Holdings Ltd, one of China’s largest apparel exporters, makes shirts and other sportswear for Adidas that will supply the 2012 games. Although Adidas would not disclose details concerning the Olympic contract, ShenZhou’s Cambodian factory produces more than 300,000 garments per month for Adidas, or about 25 per cent of the factory’s 1.3 million garment-per-month capacity. Hidden at the back of the sprawling Vattanac Industrial Park in Phnom Penh’s Chom Chao district, and employing 4,324 Cambodians, ShenZhou is by many accounts a model producer among the Kingdom’s burgeoning garment sector. Still, worker contracts and production costs show signs of a market in the throes of development. As an official sponsor of the 2012 Olympics in London, Adidas required suppliers of the Games to rank among the top 60 per cent of its supplying factories worldwide in terms of human and environmental safety and management effectiveness, William Anderson, head of Adidas’s social and environmental affairs in the Asia-Pacific region, said yesterday at the factory.

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