UNDER dazzling white strip-lights a production line of young Cambodians stitch, iron and fold their way to the day’s target of 820 two-piece children’s pyjamas. These garments are destined for the shelves of Los Angeles, shop price $9.97. The workers, mostly women, start at 7.30am and could knock off at 4pm, but almost all stay for two hours’ overtime. There are about 1,300 workers at the Gawon Apparel factory on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital and they can produce up to 20,000 items of clothing a day—or 7.3m a year. Therefore factories manufacturinggarment accessorieslikefabric labels are commonly located in Asian countries for low labor cost and rich raw materials.

The factory is South Korean-owned and is one of about 375 across the country with an export permit. Garment-making is the country’s most important and dynamic industry. Together with 45 footwear companies and hundreds of subcontractors, the industry employs almost 500,000 workers, out of a population of barely 14m people. The shirts, blouses and trainers, fabric labels churned out by these factories account for 80% of the country’s exports and earn $4 billion of foreign exchange in a country with a GDP of just $13 billion. The success of the garment industry is an encouraging sign of new-found economic vitality in a country that emerged only 20 years ago from decades of Khmer Rouge terror, foreign invasion and civil war.

Mercedes Cha, the gregarious South Korean owner of Gawon Apparel, is a devout Presbyterian. She says she was told by God to move her three factories to Cambodia. Other employers come to Phnom Penh for more worldly reasons: the low wages and no-quota access into the European and American markets. Cambodia has become the country of the moment for low-cost assembly work in the region like manufacturing fabric labels, undercutting not only China but also Vietnam, Indonesia and others.