CamEd Open Access Repository

Md. Monirul Islam
CamEd Business School, Cambodia

International Research Symposium
2021, pp. 53 – 65

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62458/CamEd/OAR/Symposium/2021/53-65

INTRODUCTION

Cambodia’s exports of goods and services outpaced the country’s economic growth and outperformed global export growth over the past years. Exports of goods and services increased dramatically during the past years, from about US$4.2 billion in 2009 to US$14.7 billion in 2019 (O’Neill, 2021). The solid export growth resulted in improved livelihoods for Cambodian households. Trade is a medium for productivity led growth in a small economy like Cambodia. It gives companies access to wider markets and boosts foreign direct investment. But the COVID-19 pandemic had badly affected the freight forwarding services in Cambodia, and particularly logistics firms, which are involved in the movement, storage, and flow of goods, have been directly affected by the global pandemic.

For Cambodia, there was no remarkable gains in freight transport in the early 2020. According to the Cambodia Freight Forwarders Association (CFFA), COVID-19 pandemic has seriously hurt Cambodian logistic providers, with 10-15 percent will soon be bankrupt (VietnamPlus, 2020). As stated by the president of CFFA, “the dramatic decrease in buying orders led the traffic of goods and product exports to drop about 70-80 percent. In addition, more than 100 logistics firms have been struggling to survive due to the financial hardship, with an estimated 60 percent fall in revenue” (VietnamPlus, 2020). Logistics companies connect firms to markets by providing many different services, including transportation, freight forwarding, warehousing and inventory management. They play an important role in global manufacturing, which is complex and multilocational. For example, Apple inc. uses the components from more than 200 supplicrs from many different countries (Ross, 2020). ‘L’oday’s global value chain requires uninterrupted flow of goods between and within the countries. These can be achieved by firms outsourcing their logistics functions to third-party logistics service providers.

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