Café Amazon's Cambodia business faces uncertain future as Thai-brand boycott bites

Café Amazon, the Thai coffee chain that built Cambodia into its largest international market with roughly 300 outlets as of November 2025, is facing what trade publication World Coffee Portal described on July 20 as an uncertain future there. A boycott of Thai-owned brands, triggered by a border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, has pushed parent company PTT OR to close a meaningful number of stores and launch a comprehensive assessment of its wider Cambodian business.

The boycott traces back to a long-running Thailand-Cambodia border dispute that escalated into armed confrontation in mid-2025. A ceasefire followed, but tensions have since resurfaced, and Cambodian consumers have increasingly avoided Thai-owned brands as a form of protest — turning a geopolitical dispute into a direct commercial problem for one of the region's largest branded coffee operators.

Cambodia is not the only Southeast Asian market where Café Amazon has struggled this year. The chain fully exited Vietnam in November 2025, closing out a five-year joint venture after failing to gain ground against strong local competition — a different failure mode in a different country, but the same underlying exposure to single-market concentration.

For franchise investors, the episode is a reminder that master franchise expansion across Southeast Asia carries country-specific political and competitive risk that no single regional growth narrative fully captures — a reason to structure cross-border deals with staged commitments rather than concentrated bets on any one market.