By Kurt Harrison
Prime Minister Hun Manet’s plan to make business registration faster is good news. Soap makers can now register in six days instead of months. This is the kind of reform small businesses need. But I want to share a different problem, one this reform does not fix. For us, registering the company was never the hard part. Getting an export licence was.
I run Coolaz.me, a small social enterprise in Siem Reap. We make cooling scarves. Cambodian women make them from home. We sell to hotels and shops that need a simple way to beat the heat. Our company is registered and our taxes are in order.
This kind of business matters for Cambodia. Every scarf is made by a woman working from her own home. She earns money without leaving her family or village. When we export, that money comes from outside Cambodia and goes straight to her. This is not the growth you see in a big story about a new factory. It is smaller and slower, built household by household. But it is real growth, and it only works if we can sell outside Cambodia.
Here is where the problem started. We had a real order from overseas. The buyer needed proper export paperwork, called a Form D, to pay a lower tariff under ASEAN trade rules. To get that, we first needed our own export licence. We asked the price and were quoted around four thousand US dollars, just for the licence. For a small home-based business, that one fee was bigger than the profit on the whole order. Nobody blocked us overseas. The cost inside Cambodia made the export impossible.
I do not think our story is unusual. Many small exporters here face the same problem. The proper, legal way to export is priced for big companies, not small ones. So many small businesses find another way. They ship goods informally and avoid Customs and duties, not because they want to break rules, but because the honest way was never built for them. No business should have to choose between a licence that costs more than the deal itself, and quietly avoiding Customs to survive.
This is the real gap. Registration reform fixes how quickly a company is created. It does not fix the cost of the export licence. A soap maker can register in six days and still find that licence out of reach.
I am not against the current reform. Faster registration is good and should continue. But if the government wants Cambodian products to compete abroad, the next step must look at the true cost of exporting, not just the speed of registration. A licence fee that is fair for a large factory is not fair for a small, home-based business.
This matters most for small businesses like ours. A large exporter can absorb a four-thousand-dollar fee easily. A home-based business cannot absorb it at all. It is income a woman near Siem Reap never receives, because the honest way to sell her work abroad was never built for someone her size.
A few simple changes would help. A lower, tiered licence fee based on shipment size, so small producers do not pay the same as major exporters. Clear public information linking the licence process to Form D, so businesses know the true cost before chasing a deal they cannot afford. And an honest recognition that when the legal route is too costly, businesses do not stop exporting, they just stop doing it legally. That helps no one, not even the government’s own customs revenue.
Cambodia’s small businesses are not asking for a free pass. We accept that licensing has a cost. We are asking for a system priced for businesses our size, so doing things properly is not only for those who can already afford it.
The soap maker’s six-day registration is a real win. The next win needs to happen at the export licence, where real growth for Cambodia, the kind built by women working from home, either gets a fair chance or gets priced out.
Kurt Harrison runs Coolaz.me, a social enterprise producing cooling products with home-based Cambodian women in Siem Reap. This article was first published in Cambodianess.
