This report is written to provide a snapshot of the current statistics and analysis of social media and digital trends in Cambodia. Since not all data are available mid-year, we will take a brief look at the data available thus far.
Social Media Snapshot
Facebook continues to be the primary platform that Cambodians use every day. According to Facebook Ads Manager data, around 10,820,000 Facebook accounts can be reached in Cambodia in June 2020. That is an increase of 4.9% in the last 6 months. In the same period, Messenger’s users have increased by more than 3,000,000 accounts to 10,217,000 (41.7% increase). Meanwhile, Instagram has enjoyed the most relative growth among Facebook’s products at a rate of 46.7%.
With an estimated population of 11.4M people at 15 years old and older and an audience of 10M on Facebook, it is no surprise that the social network has become the foremost channel in marketers’ priorities. As expected, Facebook and Messenger share virtually the same user accounts and demographics.
As we compare their audiences with Instagram though, we can see a drastic difference in adoption among different age groups and sex. The data shows that Instagram is adopted faster among female Cambodian under the age of 25. However, that [F, 13-24] only amounts to 320,000 compared to Facebook’s 1,800,000, which is less than 18%.
The more professional platform, LinkedIn, also grew in the last semester by almost 11% to 387,900 users by June 2020. At this time, updated data from Youtube and TikTok are not available yet while they have 2M and 500K users respectively towards late 2019 as reported by GeeksinCambodia.
Mobile Connections
According to the TRC, there are more than 20M “mobile connections” or unique mobile phone numbers registered in Cambodia in the latest data (April 2020). That’s a penetration rate of 124.5% compared to the current estimated population of Cambodia at 16.7M people. In the age group of 15-year-old and older the penetration rate should be even higher but that is to be expected since it is not uncommon for Cambodians to use multiple numbers and/or carriers at the same time.
According to the latest figures on their websites, Metfone, Smart Axiata, and Cellcard dominate the market share with a subscriber count of 10M, 8M, and 3M respectively.
This suggested that similar to Facebook, mobile marketing has the potential to be one of the widest-reaching tools. It is, although, should be cautioned that with one subscriber owning multiple numbers, the campaigns must be highly targeted to achieve a satisfactory ROI.
Seatel and Cootel are the only 2 other telco operators contributing to the remaining minority shares.
Digital Payment Readiness (2019)
With daily exposure to Facebook and social commerce on the platform, Cambodians have become very interested in Online Shopping in general. However, if we look at Facebook Ads audience data, we can see that among 9400K who interacted or are interested in Online Shopping, only 430K have clicked on a [Shop Now] button on Facebook in the last 7 days (July 2020).
This shows the current online shopping experience in Cambodia still relies heavily on social commerce to acquire and activate customers. Increasingly, many are turning to mobile banking and e-wallets for convenience. A lot of the population is still unbanked; therefore, sellers sometimes need to collect payment via cash or via last-mile delivery companies offer cash on delivery.
From the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) statistics, the number of e-wallet accounts increased 64% from 2018 to 5.22 million in 2019 while the number of deposit accounts reached 7.62 million within the same period. Money transferred by both banks and Payment Service Institutions (PSIs) amounted to USD 57.99 billion in 2019 constituting 213% of the GDP.
NBC has also recently released the technical details of a digital payment system, Project Bakong. The project, utilizing blockchain and decentralized ledger technology, hopes to serve as a bridge to bring more unbanked population into the formal financial sector.
Cambodia Social Media and Digital Infographic June 2020
All data on FB, Messenger, and Instagram can be accessed through either Facebook Ads Manager or Graph API. LinkedIn data are also from their ads tool.
All other sources to other data besides this are either linked in the text or in image footnote.
