Cambodia - Hear their stories

 SEA Globe

Aug. 4, 2017

From tragic personal stories to make-or-break financial decisions: meet some of the kingdom's key business leaders

In Channy, President and CEO, Acleda Bank, “The zero-to-hero banker”

Back in 1975, Channy was just a 14-year-old Phnom Penh city kid when he was evacuated at gunpoint by the Khmer Rouge to countryside labour camps, where he herded cows during the regime’s reign.

Following the liberation of the country, in 1981 he fled to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he studied teaching and then won a scholarship to study business in the US. A decade later he returned to his home country, co-founding ACLEDA with 28 other partners in 1993 as an ILO- and UNDP-funded microfinance project. It quickly became a national NGO specialising in small enterprise development and $10 credit loans to demobilised soldiers. ACLEDA became fully self-financed in 1998 and began the transformation from an NGO to a licenced microfinance institution. It was granted a specialised banking licence in 2000 with paid-up capital of $4 million, and in 2003 became a commercial bank.

Today, ACLEDA is a public limited company, with 259 offices covering all of Cambodia’s provinces, as well as 41 in Laos and six in Myanmar, and more than $4.6 billion in total assets as of 31 December 2016. The company employs more than 12,000 people in Cambodia, 1,100 in Laos and more than 160 in Myanmar, with close to 40% of the overall workforce being female.

 Rithy Sear, Chairman, Worldbridge International Group, “The path-making developer”

 As the chairman of major property development company Worldbridge Land, Rithy Sear has been on the frontline of business innovation in Cambodia in recent years. Born in Phnom Penh in 1970, Sear has said he fled the country as an 18-year-old on a boat bound for Australia, but after it sank off the coast of Sumatra he was sent to an Indonesian refugee camp. In 1992, a job with the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia brought him back to his homeland, working in the logistics arm of the operation.

“My core business is logistics, and e-commerce is related to logistics – with a nationwide logistics service you can create a proper e-commerce business,” Sear said. “There are online shops here, but they’re focused on small things. They use Facebook or websites. But they don’t have their own, nationwide platforms.”

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