Vireak Buntham Express partners with Asendia, a subsidiary of La Poste, to support the growth of Cambodian e-commerce

Cambodian transport company Vireak Buntham Express (VET) announced on June 15 the appointment of Asendia Singapore as its logistics provider for international flows, a collaboration intended to enable parcel shipments from Cambodia to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

From left to right: Senthil Kumar, CEO of Asendia Singapore and South Asia, and Suo Vireak, founder and head of the VET group

The move illustrates the race among Southeast Asian transport operators to capture a share of a rapidly expanding regional e-commerce market, at a time when international customs regulations are tightening.

On paper, the division of responsibilities is straightforward. VET retains what it has done for more than twenty years: collection and domestic delivery, through a network of more than 1,300 agencies across Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and China. Asendia, a joint subsidiary of La Poste and Swiss Post, takes over at the border to manage customs clearance and final delivery to more than 200 destinations worldwide. For Suo Vireak, founder and group head, the rationale behind the move can be summed up in one sentence: domestic operations have reached critical scale, but lacked an international extension capable of meeting current e-commerce demand.

From Asendia’s perspective, the agreement is presented as a logical step in an expansion strategy that goes beyond Cambodia. Senthil Kumar, CEO of Asendia Singapore and South Asia, highlights the group’s presence in Asia-Pacific for over ten years and identifies Cambodia as an emerging market for cross-border e-commerce logistics. The agreement with VET is part of a broader sequence: just a month earlier, Asendia signed a strategic partnership with Singapore Post to strengthen its regional hub, aiming to address the 32% of Asia-Pacific retailers who cite border delays and customs complexity as their main barrier to international growth, according to the group’s Beyond Borders study conducted among more than 1,000 e-commerce professionals. Cambodia therefore complements an already established framework in Singapore, South Asia, and beyond.

The signing day

A market still small, but growing rapidly

The figures cited in the press release require context. Cambodian e-commerce is valued at approximately USD 1.51 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 1.78 billion in 2025, according to the iTrade Bulletin published by the Ministry of Commerce—an increase of nearly 18% in one year. The sector now represents 6.68% of national GDP. In regional perspective, however, Cambodia accounts for only 1.3% of the ASEAN e-commerce market, valued at over USD 116 billion in 2024. Most online purchases in Cambodia take place through social media—primarily Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram—rather than traditional e-commerce platforms, and are concentrated in clothing, cosmetics, and food delivery, according to ministry data.

It is precisely this market structure, dominated by very small entities, that the VET statement highlights by citing the World Economic Forum: SMEs represent around 99% of Cambodia’s private sector. The challenge is therefore not to serve a few large exporters already equipped for international trade, but to give thousands of small online sellers—often active only on social media—access to a logistics chain capable of handling customs procedures for distant markets, something few could manage on their own.

The customs environment is changing, and quickly

The announcement comes at a particular moment for global cross-border e-commerce. From July 1, 2026, the European Union will abolish the €150 duty-free threshold for small imported parcels, replacing it with a flat €3 fee on all low-value imports. Washington had already suspended in August 2025 the de minimis regime that exempted shipments under USD 800. For operators like Asendia, these reforms reshape the landscape: they complicate matters for small sellers but also increase the need for providers capable of managing end-to-end customs clearance—something the group emphasizes through delivery services with duties prepaid.

For Cambodia, the issue is even broader. While the agreement with VET explicitly targets the United States as a destination market, this choice occurs in a tense trade context: Cambodian exports to the United States have faced significantly increased tariffs since summer 2025, with the country among those most exposed to the new U.S. tariff policy. This does not invalidate the project—retail e-commerce operates under a different logic than bulk industrial exports, with different thresholds, product categories, and volumes—but it does call for assessing the stated ambition against a shifting regulatory environment on both sides of the Pacific.

Another piece in the group’s logistics strategy

For Vireak Buntham, this agreement with Asendia is not an isolated move but part of a series of partnerships established in recent years to strengthen its logistics offering. In 2023, the group partnered with Station and Legs Technologies to deploy smart lockers across the country, and in March 2026 signed an agreement with Lucky Supermarket to expand its electric delivery fleet in Phnom Penh and several provinces, following a pilot phase launched in late 2025. The expansion into international logistics therefore fits within a broader trajectory of upgrading a group founded in 2004 as a bus operator, which has become in two decades one of the country’s most extensive transport and logistics networks.

The Confluences team

The company Confluences, a Cambodian market access and business development platform, played a facilitating role in connecting the two groups. Its CEO, Soreasmey Ke Bin, presents this type of commercial collaboration as a necessary bridge to strengthen Cambodia’s position in global trade and the digital economy—a view aligned with the priorities of the Cambodian government, whose e-commerce law and Digital Economy and Society Policy Framework 2021–2035 aim to accelerate the country’s integration into regional and global digital markets.

The two partners will now move into an implementation and testing phase across different destination routes, before a full operational rollout announced for the coming months.