Four companies join forces to make Sihanoukville City a FinTech Hub

By Leandra Monteiro

Continent Assets Management, PLMP Venture Capital, PropNex Cambodia and Ly Ly Kampong Seila Special Economic Zone signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on November 17th 2021, to join strategic cooperation in designing new investment projects in Sihanoukville Fintech Hub City under the honourable presences of Governor Kuoch Chamroeun and Master Plan Project Director, Chea Kok Hong following the government multipurpose SEZ master plan announcement last month.

Twenty years ago, Sihanoukville City was a sleepy fishing village, similar to the origins of Shenzhen. The real estate market took off from about 2015, which centers around casinos, hotels and condominium complexes development. As a result, the current market’s real estate stock has risen from about 200 projects in 2015 to about 1,580 in 2021.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted real estate industry, affecting 75% of projects and slowdown in development. Also, the Cambodia government issued strong mandate last year to ban of online gaming that resulted in massive clean-up to rebuilding a cohesive and safe community for the new economic initiatives, such as FinTech Hub, representing multibillion of investment opportunities for international participation.

Thus, this MOU aims to launch the first Sihanoukville re-development projects cum Fintech Hub platform to strengthen, diversify, and bring in new business income models alongside the government led Sihanoukville master plan vision. The focus will be on restructuring the under-developed assets, which will create new markets to attract international talents and entrepreneurship clusters driven by financial and technology innovators by promoting world class lifestyle facilities with top educational and vocational training institutes to develop Sihanoukville City into a vibrant e-community. The project also provision to attract retirement village development offering high yield property investment and advance health care support and tele-medicine facilities integrated into a luxurious service project development.

Since the Sihanoukville city’s location is the strategic corner of the Asia-Pacific region with deep seaport supporting SEZ developments and new economic thrust to support its growth, the group is expected to make the best out of this strategic location and timing to rebrand the city as the new important landmark that can live up with the upcoming demand of e-community in this digital age evolution in line with Cambodia STI Roadmap 2030.

By seeing momentum in big-scale infrastructure projects into the city over the years with the right market conditions and strong support from the government for productive services and innovative products to scale, a FinTech sandbox community, the elite club and innovative lifestyle services will formulate new project development modalities and at the same time, revitalize a good development image of the Sihanoukville City redevelopment master plan.