At a signing ceremony in Beijing on April 25, 2026, Li Auto Inc. named SDB as its distribution partner in Cambodia and folded the country into a four-market Asia-Pacific rollout, alongside Macau, Laos and Myanmar, that it described as preparing for official entry from May, the same day it signed dealer agreements for the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Thirty-three days later, on May 28, the Nasdaq- and Hong Kong-listed carmaker filed first-quarter results showing a vehicle margin of 6.1 percent, down from 19.8 percent a year earlier, and a net loss of RMB2.3 billion (US$330.0 million) against a net profit of RMB646.6 million in the same quarter of 2025.
The Cambodian end of that rollout was older than the announcement. SDB Motor Group (Cambodia) had announced the grand opening of a Li Auto sales and after-sales showroom in Phnom Penh on August 17, 2025, with four models on the floor, eight months before Li Auto characterized Cambodia as a market it was preparing to enter. That August announcement ran as paid placement, so it carries the distributor’s own framing rather than independent confirmation of scale, though the date and the showroom are on the record.
Li Auto’s first-quarter vehicle sales fell 12.7 percent year on year to RMB21.5 billion and total revenues fell 11.4 percent to RMB23.0 billion. Deliveries over the same quarter rose 2.5 percent to 95,142 vehicles, which puts the loss in the margin rather than in demand.
The same filing recorded a cash position of RMB94.3 billion (US$13.7 billion) at the end of March and a US$1.0 billion share-repurchase programme the company had opened on March 24, and it guided second-quarter deliveries to between 95,000 and 100,000 vehicles. Li Auto’s president, Ma Donghui, told reporters at the April session that the overseas business remained in its early stage and that the company was prioritising system-building over near-term sales and margin, according to CnEVPost, which attended. The chief financial officer, Tie Li, tied the quarter’s gross margin to measures related to Li i6 deliveries, raw-material price fluctuations and a model-refresh cycle, and put the company’s expectation at a gradual improvement in profitability.
The all-new L9 that Li Auto launched in May pairs a 72.7 kWh battery with a third-generation range extender. The L9 that SDB has marketed in Cambodia since 2025 lists a smaller 52.3 kWh battery, 220 kilometres of pure-electric range and fuel use of 7.9 litres per 100 kilometres, an earlier extended-range platform that carries a combustion engine alongside the battery. The four vehicles SDB put on the Phnom Penh floor in 2025 were the L6, L7 and L9 extended-range SUVs and the battery-electric Li Mega.
Chinese investment reached 65.5 percent of Cambodia’s total foreign-investment inflows in 2024, up from 41.3 percent in 2019, according to the World Bank. The National Bank of Cambodia put China at roughly two-thirds of inflows the same year. A China-linked carmaker taking a position in the retail and after-sales layer is consistent with where foreign capital in Cambodia already concentrates.
SDB’s beneficial ownership and the origin of its capital are not established in any company-registry filing located in open sources. No customs-entry data for Li Auto vehicles, no transport-ministry type approval and no verified electric-vehicle import-tax treatment appear in open Cambodian primary sources. The absence is an absence of public visibility, not evidence about how the trade was regulated.
SDB had a Li Auto sales-and-after-sales showroom open in Phnom Penh in 2025, before the company framed Cambodia as a 2026 entry and before the quarter that turned the expansion into a loss story. The Cambodian side of the transaction, who owns the distributor, what crossed the border and on what terms, is not yet written down anywhere a reader can check.
Methodology note
The financial spine is Li Auto’s filed first-quarter 2026 results, the Form 6-K Exhibit 99.1 dated May 28, 2026; every figure was checked against the filed text, including the statements of operations and the business-outlook section. The Cambodia entry is sourced to two independent trade outlets, CnEVPost and Gasgoo, both reporting the April 25, 2026 Beijing announcement and naming SDB inside a four-market Asia-Pacific set with Macau, Laos and Myanmar. The August 17, 2025 showroom opening rests on a Cambodianess item carried as paid placement, treated as the distributor’s own dated announcement, not as confirmation of scale. The model contrast between the 52.3 kWh L9 marketed in Cambodia since 2025 and the all-new 72.7 kWh L9 launched in May 2026 is taken from that listing and the filing. SDB’s ownership and any affiliation are treated as unestablished: no registry record and no SDB-origin self-description were located, so the piece makes no ownership claim and rests that paragraph on documented absence. The dependency figures are from the World Bank Cambodia Economic Update of June 2025 and the National Bank of Cambodia Financial Stability Review 2024, each checked against the source text. The piece makes no finding about Cambodian regulation; the customs, type-approval and import-tax points are stated as absences of public visibility. This piece rests entirely on filed and published records, and no comment was sought from the companies named.