Preah Sihanouk's $72M Project Pipeline — And the 216 Stalled Buildings Behind the Bigger Number

Provincial investment-promotion announcements in Cambodia tend to blur together — a working group reviews some projects, cites a dollar figure and a jobs estimate, and the story moves on. The July 2026 Preah Sihanouk report follows that template on its surface. Underneath it, buried in a routine statistical update, sits the most direct official acknowledgment to date of how much of the province’s investment-promotion effort is actually aimed at rescuing Sihanoukville’s stalled construction, not funding anything new.

What Was Reviewed

The Preah Sihanouk Province Investment Promotion Working Group, chaired by the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s Secretary of State Hean Sahib, reviewed 10 investment projects with combined capital of more than $72 million and the potential to create approximately 800 jobs. The projects span an SME cluster, a metal processing factory, a plywood processing factory, hotel and resort developments, and a residential building project — a genuinely diversified mix across light industry, tourism, and housing, rather than a single dominant sector.

It is worth being precise about what “reviewed” means here. This is a vetting-stage process: the working group studies the investment climate, interviews project owners, and assesses proposals against the current local and regional situation. It is not a confirmation that all 10 projects are fully funded, permitted, and under construction — it is the working group’s assessment that these projects are credible enough to warrant continued support and coordination.

Sahib’s own framing of the exercise is informative: the task force spent the first quarter of 2026 studying Preah Sihanouk’s investment climate against the global, regional, and local situation, and concluded that interviewed project owners believe recent government measures are restoring investment confidence, with real estate and tourism-sector investment activity continuing to stay active despite broader headwinds. That framing — confidence being actively rebuilt rather than already restored — is a more honest characterisation than most provincial-investment press statements offer, and it is worth taking at face value rather than reading as either spin or crisis.

The Number That Actually Matters

The $72 million headline is not the most revealing figure in the report. Buried further down is a cumulative statistic covering the working group’s full activity from 2024 through the second quarter of 2026: it has provided incentives and procedural simplification to 491 projects, with an estimated combined investment capital of $8.4 billion and the potential to create more than 60,000 jobs.

Broken down by type, those 491 projects split as follows:

• 216 projects related to stalled buildings — nearly 44% of the total
• 235 projects not related to stalled buildings, or genuinely new — just under 48%
• 25 expansion projects
• 15 existing projects (presumably receiving continued or renewed incentive support)

Read that first line again: of every ten incentivised projects in Preah Sihanouk province since 2024, more than four are efforts to revive construction that had already stalled. This is, as far as official Cambodian investment-promotion reporting goes, an unusually direct quantification of a problem that has mostly been discussed in qualitative or anecdotal terms — rows of unfinished concrete towers along Sihanoukville’s coast, a legacy of the pre-2019 online-gambling-driven construction boom that collapsed when Beijing’s gambling ban and, later, the pandemic, pulled the financing and the workforce out from under hundreds of projects simultaneously.

Why the Stalled-Building Category Is the Real Story

Cambodia’s real estate press, and this platform’s own coverage, has tracked Sihanoukville’s stalled-building problem for years — most directly in our analysis of which developers are still building through the downturn and our broader Sihanoukville location guide, which treats the unfinished-tower inventory as one of the market’s defining and unresolved risks.

What the Preah Sihanouk working group’s data adds is a scale marker, even if an imprecise one. If 216 stalled-building projects have received incentives and procedural simplification since 2024, that implies the province’s inventory of halted or troubled projects runs comfortably into the hundreds — a figure larger than most informal estimates that have circulated in trade coverage, and one that comes from the government body actually working through the caseload rather than from outside observers counting visible skeletons along the coast road.

It is important not to over-read what “incentivised” means for these 216 projects. Receiving procedural simplification or an incentive package is a necessary condition for a stalled project to restart — it removes some of the administrative and financial friction that likely contributed to the stall in the first place — but it is not sufficient. A stalled tower that gets a tax incentive and a faster permit process still needs a developer with working capital, a construction contractor willing to resume, and eventually buyers or tenants willing to commit to a building with a troubled history. The working group’s own report does not claim to track how many of the 216 have actually resumed construction, reached completion, or found end-users — only that they have received the incentive and simplification treatment.

The New Projects Against That Backdrop

Seen against the stalled-buildings figure, the 10 newly vetted projects worth $72 million read less as “Sihanoukville is booming” and more as “Sihanoukville’s investment-promotion apparatus is working two problems simultaneously” — attracting genuinely new, smaller-scale, diversified investment (an SME cluster, light manufacturing, modest hospitality and residential projects) while also managing a much larger legacy caseload of stalled construction inherited from the previous boom cycle.

That dual mandate is arguably the more accurate description of where Sihanoukville’s property and investment market actually stands in mid-2026: not a market in fresh crisis, and not a market in full recovery, but one being actively worked through by provincial and national authorities on two fronts at once, with the stalled-building resolution effort considerably larger in scale than the new-project pipeline getting most of the headline attention.

The specific new projects also skew toward industrial and light-manufacturing uses — a metal processing factory and a plywood processing factory alongside the SME cluster — which fits the working group’s own observation that Preah Sihanouk’s industrial sector “remains in good shape” and draws on local raw material inputs: timber, wood chips, cassava flour, rubber, and salt. That is consistent with the broader thesis this platform has tracked around Sihanoukville’s post-gaming transition — that industrial and SEZ-adjacent activity has proven more resilient than the tourism and residential-hospitality segments, a pattern reinforced by the same week’s news of a new submarine cable landing at Sihanoukville aimed at supporting exactly this kind of industrial and BPO investment.

The Trajectory, Not Just the Snapshot

The 491-project, $8.4 billion figure is not the working group’s first cumulative disclosure. A prior report from December 2025 put the total at 412 projects worth nearly $8 billion. Set side by side, that is roughly 79 additional projects and about $400 million in incremental incentivised capital added over a seven-month span — a steady, incremental pace rather than a sudden acceleration or a stall.

That trajectory is useful precisely because it is unremarkable. A working group whose cumulative numbers grow gradually, quarter over quarter, is more credible evidence of an ongoing, functioning process than one that reports a sudden jump timed to coincide with a positive news cycle. It also means the 216 stalled-building figure disclosed in this report is not a one-off count — it has presumably been building steadily alongside the rest of the cumulative total, which reinforces the read that Preah Sihanouk’s stalled-construction caseload has been a persistent, ongoing feature of the province’s investment-promotion work throughout 2024 to 2026, not a problem that suddenly surfaced or was suddenly prioritised.

What to Watch

• The completion rate among the 216 stalled-building projects. If future working-group reports begin disclosing how many of these have resumed construction or reached completion — rather than simply how many received incentives — that would be the real measure of whether this effort is working.
• Whether the $72 million pipeline converts to confirmed, operating projects within a reasonable timeframe, and whether the 800 estimated jobs materialise.
• The ratio of stalled-building projects to genuinely new ones in future reporting cycles. A declining share of stalled-building incentives relative to new-project incentives would indicate the legacy caseload is shrinking; a stable or rising share would suggest the backlog remains as large as ever, even as new incentives are issued alongside it.

For property investors and developers evaluating Sihanoukville, the working group’s own numbers are the clearest official signal yet that the market’s stalled-construction overhang is both larger than commonly discussed and actively being worked, without yet being resolved. Both of those things are true, and the $72 million headline obscures rather than clarifies which one matters more for anyone considering the province today.

Sources

• [S-886] Khmer Times — Preah Sihanouk promotion group vets 10 projects worth $72M (26 July 2026) — the 10 newly reviewed projects, the 491-project cumulative total since 2024, the $8.4 billion combined capital figure, and the 216 stalled-building breakdown.
• [S-887] Research Cambodia — Who Is Still Building? Cambodia’s Counter-Cyclical Developers — the broader pattern of which developers have continued building through Cambodia’s property downturn.
• [S-888] Research Cambodia — Sihanoukville Location Guide — the province’s boom-bust cycle and the unfinished-tower inventory this report’s stalled-building figures help quantify.