From showcasing a successful fried-banana vendor to trumpeting the benefits of recycling car tires, Cambodia's first business TV show is breaking fresh ground.
Business Edge, a half-hour magazine-style show broadcast weekly, is catering to the growing number of small and medium-sized businesses in Cambodia helping the economy revive after decades of conflict that ended only in 1998.
PHOTO: AFP
The program, which kicked off a year-long series in September and is likely to extend into a second season, fills a gap on Cambodian TV, squeezed between glitzy variety shows, melodramatic soap operas and dry political commentary.
"This is the first and only program ever shown in Cambodia to provide people with both basic and in-depth information on the Cambodian business situation," ministry of commerce secretary of state Sok Siphana said.
"More business people are turning to it for business advice and students too, for practical examples of the theory they've learned in school," he added.
The program explores challenges faced by businesses anywhere, but with a Cambodian slant.
Topics covered so far include securing finances, pain-free office relocation, the plus-es of recycling, including car tires, and building loyalty among employees.
Producer Dim Sovannarum said the show was blazing a unique trail in Cambodia.
"Our production is different from Chinese drama series, game shows and so on and we mainly focus on only three elements: information, information and more information," he said.
Filming the show presents peculiarly Cambodian challen-ges, with some otherwise feisty entrepreneurs declining to appear for fear of being kidnapped after having their success advertised, or being extorted, Dim said.
Kidnappings are rare in the kingdom, but the wariness is probably a legacy of the years of violence here, including the 1970s regime of the Khmer Rouge, when all private enterprise was suspended and even money abolished.
Shyness is another obstacle to overcome.
"That's typical of Cambodian people," Dim said.
Chhim Vannak, the owner of a now booming fried-banana shop in downtown Phnom Penh that began as a humble street stall in 1994, has starred on the show and says he is picking up a few pointers himself from tuning in.
"I have watched about 20 episodes so far.
They teach and explain how to run a successful business," he told AFP, adding that he had learned to focus more on quality and service, while he has also decided against raising prices.
The show is funded by the Mekong Private Sector Development Facility (MPDF), itself backed by an array of international donors and which aims at boosting growth of small and medium businesses in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam as a way of firing up their economies.
The MPDF's Lili Sisombat said the show's idea was hatched in 2001 when they were brainstorming how to spread business news in Cambodia, a mainly agricultural country where a third of the population survives on less than a dollar a day.
"Cambodian people here were just not reading enough ... and there were no radio channels professional enough to broadcast this kind of program," she said, adding that television was the obvious next choice.
Media giant CNBC was also called in to provide advice on international angles for some segments of the program, which is broadcast across five of Cambodia's 24 provinces and municipalities to an estimated 15,000 viewers.
The commerce ministry's Sok Siphana hopes that the show may help give Cambodian businesses an edge as they face up to stiffer competition when the kingdom accedes to the World Trade Organization within the next few months.
"The WTO will open the international market for Cambodia, but if Cambodian people do not understand business it will be very difficult," he warned.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS