DAP: The breaking news in Cambodia: “Cambodian state-owned telecom firm sees 5% revenue drop in H1” plus 3 more

PHNOM PENH, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- The state-owned Telecom Cambodia reported a 5 percent decline in revenues in the first half of this year due to tough competition in the country's telecommunication industry, company director general Lao Saroeun said Friday.

During the January-June period this year, the firm earned a gross revenue of 14.2 million U.S. dollars, a 5 percent drop from 15 million U.S. dollars a year earlier, he told Xinhua over telephone, attributing the decline to tough competition in the telecom market.

The Southeast Asian nation has the population of about 14.5 million. Currently, the country has two fixed phone operators eight mobile phone operators.

In addition, there are about 30 internet service providers.

"We are strengthening our service quality and offering competitive prices to customers in order to re-grow our revenues in the second half of this year," Lao Saroeun said.

He said the company has about 35,000 subscribers, and the revenues come from local and international phone calls, internet service providers, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line services ( ADSL), phone connection, fiber optic cable, interconnection fees and transit fees.

The firm is one of the three stated-owned enterprises that have been ordered by the government to prepare IPO (Initial Public Offering) in order to list in the Cambodian Security Exchange (CSX) .

Lao Saroeun said the decrease in revenues was slight, and it would not affect the firm's plan to list in the CSX early next year.

PHNOM PENH, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- The second Cambodia- International Machinery Industrial Fair kicked off here on Friday, aiming at promoting the development of industries, officials said.

More than 200 exhibitors from 20 countries and regions have been displaying the international leading brands of industrial equipment in textile and garment, footwear and leather, fabrics and garment accessories, plastics and rubber, printing and packaging, food processing, medical and pharmaceutical equipment, and agriculture-related machinery, said Judy Wang, president of Yorkers Trade and Marketing Service of Hong Kong, which organized the event.

The exhibitors are from Cambodia, China, Czech, Germany, China' s Hong Kong, China's Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam, she said.

The 4-day event, held at the capital's Diamond Island Exhibition Center, would be a platform for manufacturers, buyers, traders, distributors, and government officials to meet in order to exchange ideas on the development of industrial sector.

"It is also a chance for manufacturers to modernize their machinery to increase production capacity," she said, adding that this year's event was 35 percent bigger in scale than that of last year.

Mao Thora, secretary of state at the Ministry of Commerce, said at the inaugural ceremony that Cambodian industrial base mainly relied on garment, accounted for about 75 percent of the country's industrial sector.

"The event paves the way for Cambodia to develop its current and future machinery industries with up-to-date modern technologies," he said.

He added that industries are deemed to be main pillars of the Cambodian economic development and they have been starting to gain steady progress in recent years.