When I first came to Phnom Penh in 2012 the nearest equivalent to a shopping mall was the Sorya Shopping Center (not to be confused with Golden Sorya Mall, which wasn’t a shopping mall either but a now-defunct, distinctly sleazy ‘pub street’). Sorya was more like an indoor market hall but it had Cambodia’s first escalator and that alone qualified it as a futuristic shopping experience by the capital’s standards of the time. Twelve years on and the retail landscape has been transformed as Phnom Penh embraces mall culture with zeal.

Japanese retail giant Aeon led the way in 2014 with the opening of its first Aeon Mall on Sothearos Boulevard. Locals approached it with eager curiosity while expats cheered the arrival of brands like Mango, Daiso, and Lock ‘n’ Lock and the chance to shop in air-conditioned comfort. This medium-sized mall has since been expanded and revamped and remains the most convenient location in central Phnom Penh to meet your shopping needs. Customers can shop international names like H & M, Nine West, Ecco, Superdry, and Decathlon; an increasing number of upmarket brands like Coach, Michael Kors, and Tommy Hilfiger; and a wealth of sports retailers including Adidas, ASICS, Puma, and New Balance. Nojima has an excellent range of phones and home electrical appliances large and small; there are optical services; pharmacies, and beauty stores; and a very popular World Dining food court on the ground floor. Lively Plaza lives up to its name with regular promotions and activities and of course there’s loads of parking for those ginormous SUVs.

Aeon 2 opened its doors four years later in the fast-developing Sen Sok area of the city with more of the same brands but on a significantly larger scale. Its huge Decathlon store alone was worth the thirty minutes or so ride out of the city center. Of course modern mall culture is about more than just shopping and each Aeon Mall boasts its share of Asian and Western food and drink outlets, mainly of the fast food variety including Pizza Company, Burger King, and Starbucks, along with a Major Cineplex and a bowling alley.

For its hat trick in 2023, Aeon invested $390,000 million in a third mall, its largest and most spectacular to date, commanding 174,000 square metres of prime development land in the Mean Chey district of Phnom Penh en route to where the new airport is nearing completion. Its stunning design over four floors incorporates huge LCD screens and there’s a spacious outdoor park and playground.

Naturally local developers have been keen to get in on the act, most notably the Chip Mong Group that operates a number of supermarkets around the city along with the Chip Mong Noromall on Norodom Boulevard, a toe in the water that has yet to really take off. In 2023 Chip Mong launched its showpiece retail and leisure development, Chip Mong 271 Mega Mall, on the edge of the city center. That this visually impressive mall boasts Cambodia’s first branch of Zara — and a stylish, spacious one at that — is enough of a draw for me, but it’s also home to the upscale likes of Paul Smith, Karl Lagerfield, Smeg, and Lacoste; the fun (and cheap!) Kohnan Japan Home Center, plus branches of H & M, Vietnamese fashion store Routine, Charles & Keith, Crocs, and other brands familiar from Aeon and elsewhere. According to Chip Mong, more malls are in the pipeline.

There are smaller malls too: Olympia Mall in the Olympia City development; Exchange Square Shopping Mall; and the Lucky Pavilion Mall currently growing around Lucky Supermarket on Sihanouk Boulevard. Toul Kork has the long-standing TK Avenue Mall, which is really more of an outdoor shopping center. Sorya Shopping Center, meanwhile, has been reborn as Sorya Center Point following a $5 million investment. Increasingly, residential and commercial developments like The Bridge, The Point, Raintree, and Eden Garden are incorporating mall-style shopping and leisure facilities, some more successful than others.

It’s unlikely the escalation of malls will stop here. Cambodia has a growing middle class and malls are becoming part of the leisure experience. Indeed, the massive numbers of new jobs these malls create is putting spending money into the pockets of young people in particular.  As yet the country doesn’t have quite the distribution network needed to support the move of many more international brands into the country but the increasing demand that comes with a growing economy may well change that. (If anyone from Uniqlo is reading this, we need you here!)