Exports to the bloc rose. Everything Cambodia sold abroad rose about twice as fast.
Cambodia sold $7.22 billion of goods to the other fourteen members of the RCEP trade bloc in the first eight months of this year. That came to 29.4 per cent of everything the country exported. A year earlier the same measure stood at 31.8 per cent.
The bloc is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in force since 2022. It links the ten ASEAN countries with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and cuts tariffs between them. Cambodia is one of fifteen members, which leaves fourteen partners.
Both shares are the Ministry of Commerce’s own, from the accounts Khmer Times published of its eight-month trade report, released over the weekend, and of the same report a year earlier. Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, carried this year’s report as well. Each covers January to the end of August, and the share is the same line in the same annual series.
Exports to the bloc were $6.63 billion in the same months of 2025. The ministry gives the increase as 8.9 per cent.
The share fell because the number underneath it grew. That share sets what Cambodia sells to the bloc against what it sells to everybody. When the second figure grows faster, the share drops even as the sales rise. Cambodia’s total exports came to $24.51 billion, up 17.7 per cent on the ministry’s own totals for the two periods, against 8.9 per cent for the bloc. Neither report sets the two years side by side. The comparison is this publication’s.
The ministry does not lead on the export share. Its headline figure is two-way trade, which adds imports and exports together. That reached $31.93 billion with the bloc, or 61.26 per cent of Cambodia’s international trade of $52.13 billion.
Sixty-one per cent is a measure of traffic in both directions, not of where Cambodia sells. The two answer different questions, and the distinction matters to anyone reading the bigger number as a guide to demand. A firm weighing where its next order will come from, or where a new factory’s output will go, is asking where Cambodia sells. That is the export share, and it is 29.4 per cent.
The buying side is what makes the gap so wide. Of the $31.93 billion that flowed both ways, $24.71 billion was Cambodia buying, up 25 per cent from $19.73 billion in 2025. For every dollar of goods Cambodia sold into the bloc this year, it bought $3.42 worth. Last year the figure was $2.98.
The reports are built around exports and two-way trade. Each gives the bloc’s figures with the change on the year, gives Cambodia’s total exports and its total international trade, and gives nothing at all for what Cambodia bought from the world. The national totals in them are the ministry’s.
The General Department of Customs and Excise, which collects the duties, publishes its own, and the figures differ. Customs put Cambodia’s exports at $24.16 billion for these eight months and at $20.18 billion for the same months last year. Set the bloc’s export figures against those totals instead and the share runs 32.8 per cent last year to 29.9 this year. Which body’s total is used does not change the direction.
The import side has to be worked out. Each report gives a total trade figure and a total export figure, and the difference between the two is what Cambodia bought from everywhere. On that subtraction the import bill comes to $27.62 billion this year and $21.97 billion last year. Those totals are not the ministry’s own. Against them the bloc supplied 89.5 per cent of what Cambodia bought this year, and 89.8 per cent last year.
None of this makes the bloc a smaller partner in cash terms. Both sides of the trade with it grew this year. Exports to it rose 8.9 per cent to $7.22 billion. Imports from it rose faster still. On the measure the ministry leads on, the bloc stands at 61.26 per cent against 61.5 a year earlier. A share worked out against a base that grew faster is not a decline in the trading relationship.
The split between the two measures has surfaced before. A report here in July found imports carrying most of the growth in Cambodia’s trade with the bloc, on an earlier set of the ministry’s figures. Both measures run side by side in the same releases.
Penn Sovicheat, a secretary of state and the ministry’s spokesman, says the agreement is driving export growth and drawing in investment. He has said substantially the same thing as each of the last four RCEP reports came out, from September last year to the seven-month set in August.
Trade between members is not the same thing as trade that used the agreement. An exporter claims the lower RCEP tariff on a shipment by filing a Form RCEP certificate of origin. Where no form is filed, the goods still cross the border and still count in the trade figures, at whatever tariff would have applied without the agreement.
The Ministry of Commerce issues those certificates. Its certificate portal lists Form RCEP among the preferential forms it handles, alongside those for Cambodia’s other preferential schemes, and on 14 September showed no figure for how many have gone out. None appears in the four reports read. How much of this trade moved on the agreement’s terms is not, on those channels, public.