On a rain-sodden day in September 2023, reporters entered the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone on the southwest coast of Cambodia, in the country’s largest port city. Established in 2008 through a partnership between Chinese and Cambodian private companies, the Sihanoukville SEZ hosts a range of Cambodian and Chinese ventures exporting products worldwide.
Among them is Nature Flooring (Cambodia), a Chinese-owned company established in the Sihanoukville SEZ in May 2019. Nature Flooring is just one of the many subsidiaries of China’s Nature Home Group, focused on wooden flooring and doors. The firm’s website states that the group is valued at 87.6 billion yuan (about $12 billion) and boasts several partnerships with U.S. companies.
Over the course of a year, Mongabay has collected evidence that suggests much of the plywood used to craft the products sold by Nature Flooring and other companies within the Sihanoukville SEZ may have been illegally logged from protected Cambodian rainforests.
