Cambodia’s labour ministry counted 724 workers at the Poipet plant in August. Kiripost puts the shutdown at 22 October, and Nikkei reports the work moving to a site in Thailand.
Nidec will end production in Cambodia, closing its plant at Poipet on the border with Thailand. Cambodia’s Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training said in August that the factory employed 724 people and would stop work in October. The Cambodian news site Kiripost put the total shutdown at 22 October.
Nidec’s own page for the site describes its business as manufacturing components for precision motors, and the subsidiary trades as Nidec Die-casting Cambodia. Die-casting forces molten metal into a mould under pressure to form a part. The part is not the motor, and it never reaches a shop. It travels on to a factory that assembles the finished motor, in volume, again the next day and the day after that.
Poipet is in Banteay Meanchey, the Cambodian province on the main road crossing into Thailand. The labour ministry gave two reasons for the closures there, and only one of them is about freight: higher transport costs, and falling orders.
On transport it set out a before and after. Goods from factories in the province once reached production facilities in Thailand in about one to two hours. They now go by sea through a second country before entering Thailand, the ministry said, and sometimes by air, at costs it put at dozens of times higher. It gave no figure to start from, and it described the province’s factories as a group rather than this plant’s shipments.
The two arrangements are not one journey at different speeds. A truck leaves when it is loaded, and if a line runs short in the afternoon another truck can go in the afternoon. A ship leaves from a port, on a booking made days in advance, and airlines charge freight by weight, which punishes a box of metal parts. A factory feeding an assembly line two hours away by road runs on the first of those. The second is a different kind of arrangement, and the difference shows up in what a shipment costs and in how long it takes to arrive.
Two other factories in the province appear in the same ministry statement. ML Intimate Apparel employed 683 people and Hi-Tech 2,532. The ministry said both had closed and that workers at both had received their wages and other benefits. With the Nidec plant that is 3,939 people across three factories, on this desk’s own addition of the ministry’s three figures. The ministry set the numbers out separately, and the three closures do not share a date.
Three months before the ministry spoke, Nidec published a plan of its own. A presentation dated 13 May, Toward Nidec Reform, puts the group at 248 production sites as of March 2026 against a goal of 160 to 180. That is a cut of between 68 and 88 sites, on the company’s own two figures. The document names no country, no subsidiary and no plant.
So two accounts are in public and they are about different things. One is a rise in cost and a fall in orders that reached factories across Banteay Meanchey whatever they made and whoever owned them. The other is a Japanese company reducing production sites worldwide, on a schedule it set and published before Phnom Penh said anything, without saying which sites go. Neither document mentions the other, and neither says which one ended Poipet.
As of 13 September, Nidec’s 2026 news release pages carried no announcement of the closure, and none had appeared through the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s disclosure service. Nothing reached shows whether the exchange’s rules required a company to announce a plant closure of this size.
The ministry issued its statement on 18 August, and a Cambodian outlet carried it two days later. Nikkei Asia reported the closure on 13 September, twenty-four days after that, and said the work would move to a base in Thailand.
Two things hold: the date, and the direction. Production at Poipet stops in October, on 22 October by Kiripost’s account. On Nikkei’s, the same work starts again at a Nidec site across the border. The ministry’s count of the people working there in August was 724.