Sihanoukville: 209 Chinese-backed projects stall as developers pull out

Sihanoukville is Cambodia’s coastal boomtown that never really finished booming. Chinese money flooded in during the 2010s, towers shot up fast, and then the whole thing seized up. COVID helped freeze construction, a lot of developers left, and the city got tangled up with online scam networks that later faced a crackdown. Now the government is trying to restart the place — but the numbers show how incomplete that cleanup still is. (cambojanews.com) ### What changed now? The clearest new update came out of the government’s investment working group in late March 2026. Officials said that from 2024 through February 2026 they had approved special incentives for 467 projects in Preah Sihanouk province, with total planned investment of about $(cambojanews.com)old mess is still sitting there in concrete form. (kiripost.com) ### Why does the number 209 matter? Because it means this is not just a growth story. It is a salvage story. Sihanoukville is not mainly adding fresh, clean-sheet development — it is spending a huge share of its policy effort trying to unstick half-built towers, abandoned shells, and land deals that stopped (kiripost.com)line is still basically a backlog. (kiripost.com) ### Where did these unfinished buildings come from? The short version is a China-fueled construction frenzy collided with a hard stop. Sihanoukville drew massive Chinese investment in the mid-2010s, and thousands of high-rises went up or started going up. Then the pandemic hit, capital flows weakened, and ma(kiripost.com)nd very limited ability to finish them alone. (cambojanews.com) ### Why hasn’t the city just moved on? Because unfinished buildings are sticky problems. They tie up land, create safety and maintenance issues, and make the city look like a project that failed halfway through. Cambodian officials have been offering tax breaks, fee waivers, and easier permitt(cambojanews.com)entives for unfinished buildings were later pushed out to 2028. That tells you the government knows this will take years, not months. (kiripost.com) ### Didn’t the incentives help already? Yes — but only partly. By April 2025, provincial officials said more than 230 projects had been approved for incentives, about $6 billion had been invested, and roughly 120 out of 365 unfinished constructions had been resolved. That is real movement. But it also means (kiripost.com)ly or quickly. (cambodianess.com) ### What made recovery harder lately? The catch is that Sihanoukville’s economy did not just depend on legal construction money. It also became entangled with gambling and scam-linked activity. CamboJA’s April 2026 reporting says a late-2025 crackdown on scam operations triggered another wave of Ch(cambodianess.com)ies to attract “real” investment, one of the city’s de facto economic engines has been forcibly shut down. (cambojanews.com) ### So is this a comeback or a warning sign? It is both. The headline number — 467 projects, $8.18 billion, 55,124 projected jobs — sounds like a turnaround. But the composition matters more than the headline. When 209 approved projects are still about unfinished buildings, the city is still repairing the damage from the first boom rather than confidently building the next one. (kiripost.com) ### Bottom line Sihanoukville is not short on plans. It is short on clean closure. The government has built a mechanism to recycle stalled projects, and some of it is working. But the city still looks like a place where foreign capital arrived fast, left faster, and handed Cambodia a long, expensive cleanup. (cambojanews.com)