3,319 Factories, 1.3 Million Workers: Cambodia's Industrial Base by the Numbers

Cambodia’s Ministry of Industry released a set of numbers in mid-July that deserve more attention than the single headline percentage they generated: 3,319 operating factories, over 1.3 million industrial workers, $27.8 billion in cumulative sector investment, and industrial production value up 63% to $7.9 billion in the first five months of 2026 alone. Read individually, these are impressive but somewhat abstract macro statistics. Read together, and against this platform’s ongoing coverage of Cambodia’s manufacturing FDI pattern, they describe a specific and measurable property-demand story that is easy to miss underneath the headline growth number.

The Numbers, Assembled

Minister of Industry, Science, Technology and Innovation Hem Vanndy announced the figures at the opening of the 2026 Industrial Development Congress and Industrial Expo at Phnom Penh’s Koh Pich Convention and Exhibition Centre. The core dataset, as of end-June 2026:

• 3,319 operating factories nationwide, employing more than 1.3 million people, including over 940,000 women — roughly 70% of the total industrial workforce.
• $27.8 billion in cumulative sector investment, up approximately $5.7 billion (more than 25%) year-on-year. Domestic investment accounted for over $4.2 billion of that total — about 15%, with the remainder foreign-sourced.
• $7.9 billion in industrial production value for the first five months of 2026, up roughly $3.8 billion, or 63%, from the same period in 2025 — split between approximately $5.9 billion in exports and $2 billion for domestic consumption.
• Around 700 new factories established in 2025 alone, according to Phay Chantravuth, the Ministry’s Director-General of Industry — a single-year addition equivalent to more than a fifth of the current total factory count.

The Tariff-Relocation Narrative, Named Directly

What makes this release more than a routine statistics dump is the Ministry’s own explanation for the acceleration. Chantravuth attributed the growth explicitly to “external tariff pressures imposed by the United States,” which he said have “prompted many manufacturers to relocate investments in search of new production destinations” — with Cambodia positioned as a beneficiary of that relocation given its more favourable business environment and, implicitly, a lower US tariff rate than some regional competitors.

This is not a new thesis on this platform — it is the same dynamic covered in our analysis of Cambodia’s US tariff rate against Thailand and Vietnam and the broader Vietnam Plus One supply-chain shift. What this release adds is a Ministry official naming the mechanism directly and attaching a factory-count figure to it: roughly 700 new factories in a single year is a concrete, countable expression of a trend this platform has otherwise tracked through investment-pledge announcements and individual company profiles.

Where the Growth Is Concentrated

Chantravuth identified the sectors driving the strongest recent growth: garment, footwear, and travel goods production — Cambodia’s traditional manufacturing base — alongside electronics manufacturing (particularly electric-vehicle-related industries), tyre manufacturing, and agro-processing. That mix is consistent with the diversification pattern this platform has tracked across individual company stories: MinebeaMitsumi’s precision electronics in Pursat, the automotive and tyre manufacturing cluster in Kandal and Kampong Speu, and the SPIN-backed agro-processing push in the northeastern provinces. The Ministry’s national aggregate data and this platform’s company-level reporting are, in effect, describing the same underlying trend from two different altitudes.

Reading Factory Count and Workforce Growth as Two Distinct Property Signals

The property-market implications of this data split cleanly into two separate demand categories, and conflating them understates the story.

Factory-count growth is industrial and SEZ land demand, directly. Seven hundred new factories in a single year is seven hundred new sites requiring serviced industrial land, factory shells, utility connections, and — per this platform’s recent coverage of CDC-approved renewable capacity — reliable power. This is the segment of Cambodia’s property market that responds most directly and quickly to manufacturing FDI, and the segment where SEZ developers with available, serviced land are the clearest beneficiaries of a headline number like this one.

Workforce growth is worker-housing and rental demand, indirectly but substantially. Over 1.3 million industrial workers — a figure that has grown alongside the 700-factory addition — need somewhere to live near their workplace. This platform has noted elsewhere that worker housing near established SEZs is among the more stable, if unglamorous, rental-property segments in Cambodia, less exposed to the boom-bust cycles that have characterised tourism-driven and speculative-condo segments of the market. A workforce that is 70% women concentrated in garment, footwear, and light-electronics roles has specific housing characteristics worth noting: typically lower individual income than male-dominated heavy-industrial or construction roles, which shapes the price point and unit type (dormitory-style and basic rental housing rather than family units) that actually clears in the market around these factories, as distinct from the borey and condo product marketed to a different buyer entirely.

The Domestic Investment Detail

One figure in the release deserves more attention than it typically gets in coverage of Cambodia’s manufacturing growth: domestic investment accounted for more than $4.2 billion of the $27.8 billion cumulative total — about 15%. Cambodia’s industrial narrative is, understandably, dominated by foreign direct investment stories, from MinebeaMitsumi’s Japanese precision electronics to the Chinese-backed SEZ clusters this platform has tracked extensively. A domestic investment share running at roughly one dollar in seven is a smaller but genuinely useful counterweight to a narrative that can otherwise read as entirely foreign-capital-dependent.

This matters for how durable the current growth cycle should be judged. An industrial base built entirely on foreign capital is more exposed to shifts in the specific geopolitical and trade conditions — like the US tariff dynamics discussed above — that brought that capital in the first place. A meaningful, if still minority, domestic investment share suggests at least some of the growth is being driven by Cambodian capital responding to the same market conditions rather than exclusively chasing tariff arbitrage, which is a modestly more durable growth pattern than one entirely dependent on relocation-driven foreign capital.

Connecting This to the Borey Belt

This platform’s coverage of Phnom Penh’s satellite borey belt has tracked landed housing development in the ring of districts surrounding the capital — precisely the geography where much of Cambodia’s industrial expansion is also concentrated, in Kandal, Kampong Speu, and the wider Phnom Penh periphery. The relationship between industrial workforce growth and borey demand is worth being precise about: borey product, generally priced for middle-income Cambodian buyers rather than industrial-wage workers, is not the direct housing outcome of factory-floor employment growth. The more direct connection runs through household formation further up the income chain — supervisory and administrative roles within growing factories, plus the secondary economy (logistics, retail, services) that a larger industrial workforce supports — rather than production-line workers themselves, who are more likely tenants of basic rental housing and dormitories than borey buyers.

Understanding this distinction matters for anyone using national industrial-growth statistics to underwrite a specific residential development thesis: a rising factory count is a real, positive signal for the broader provincial economy a borey project sits within, but it is an indirect signal, filtered through several steps of income and household formation, rather than a direct one-to-one demand driver the way it is for industrial land and basic worker rental housing.

The Honest Caveat

Ministry-reported statistics of this kind deserve the same scrutiny this platform applies to other government data releases: they are self-reported, generated by the institution whose performance the numbers reflect, and not independently audited. A 63% year-on-year production-value increase is a striking figure, and striking figures from any government ministry are worth double-checking against independent trade data where possible — export figures, in particular, can often be cross-referenced against destination-country import statistics, a exercise beyond the scope of this article but a reasonable next step for anyone underwriting a specific industrial-property decision on the strength of this trend.

What the figures do support, without needing independent verification, is direction: Cambodia’s factory count and industrial workforce have been growing, foreign investors have continued establishing new manufacturing operations through 2025 and into 2026, and the sectors named — electronics, automotive and tyre manufacturing, agro-processing — are the same sectors this platform has tracked through individual, verifiable company announcements. The trend is real even if the precise percentage should be treated with the same caution applied to any single-source government statistic.

What to Watch

• Whether the 700-factory annual addition rate holds through 2026 — a comparable figure at year-end would confirm whether 2025’s pace was a peak or a new baseline.
• Independent trade data corroborating the $5.9 billion export figure — destination-country import statistics from the US, EU, and regional partners would be the most reliable cross-check on Cambodia’s own reported export growth.
• Worker-housing rental rates near the newest factory clusters — the more granular, harder-to-track signal that would confirm whether workforce growth is translating into actual rental-market tightness near specific industrial zones, as opposed to remaining a national aggregate statistic.

Sources

• [S-913] Khmer Times — Cambodia’s industrial output surges 63% in the first five months of 2026: Minister (17 July 2026) — Minister Hem Vanndy’s and Director-General Phay Chantravuth’s remarks at the 2026 Industrial Development Congress, factory count, workforce, investment, and production-value figures.
• [S-914] Research Cambodia — Cambodia’s US Tariff Rate Against Thailand and Vietnam — the tariff-relocation dynamic the Ministry cites as a growth driver.
• [S-915] Research Cambodia — CDC Approved $1B in Clean Energy Projects in H1 2026 — the power-infrastructure context feeding this same industrial expansion.