More than 11 million people visited Phnom Penh – a city with a population of barely 2.4 million – last year as Cambodia rides a wave of some of the fastest economic growth in Asia and a booming tourism industry.
That was an increase of 63 percent over 2023, Phnom Penh Governor Khuong Sreng said during the opening of the annual performance review of the Phnom Penh capital administration on Tuesday. He said the capital area was seeing substantial growth.
“In 2024, Phnom Penh witnessed the construction of 453 new housing complexes, 1,877 high-rise buildings of five floors or more and 811 factories,” Sreng said.
Authorities are rapidly expanding services in the city, including schools, health care, building regulations and waste management, to make it an attractive place to live, he added.
Phnom Penh’s population has been growing a steady 3 percent a year over the past five years and a decade ago, just under 2 million people lived in the capital.
While Angkor Wat and Siem Reap remain the major draw for international tourists, Phnom Penh is increasingly featuring on itineraries.
The capital received almost 1.6 million visitors in the last two days of 2024 alone, Ministry of Tourism (MoT) data shows.
That comprised about 1.55 Cambodians and almost 20,000 foreigners.
Prime Minister Hun Manet has urged the acceleration of the development of the capital region.
He told the Phnom Penh Municipal Administration recently that it must enhance the city’s beauty and attractiveness and aspire to be on par with the best of other ASEAN capitals.
The Phnom Penh Master Plan on Land Use 2035 foresees a population of 6 million people in the capital within a decade.
Cambodia is witnessing one of the highest economic growth rates in Asia, about 6.3 percent in 2025, according to the government’s Budget in Brief Report released last week.
That compares with the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) forecast of average growth of 4.7 percent across Southeast Asia and 6.0 percent for Cambodia.
According to the Royal Government’s assessment of the medium-term public financial framework, this growth is expected to increase GDP to $51.39 billion and GDP per capita to $2,924.
Cambodia last year welcomed a record 6.7 million international tourists – a 23 percent increase over the previous year and surpassing the pre-Covid high of 6.6 million in 2019. The Kingdom expects more than 7.2 million foreign visitors in 2025, according to the MoT.
