Sovandarapor (James) Kong

James works across agriculture, food, beverage, media and software in Cambodia. Rice export. A dairy turnaround. A spirits house. Talent management. A monitoring platform. Different sectors, one thread: a real thing exists, and almost nobody has done the unglamorous work of making it legible to the outside world. English, Khmer, French. Phnom Penh, everywhere.

Hospitality, first

The first business I worked in was the family's hotel in Siem Reap, Damrei Angkor Hotel and Phoum Chaufea. A stretch abroad sharpened it: a year in sales operations at Eatigo, a restaurant booking business, then a year running TikTok's content ecosystem for the Cambodian market from ByteDance's regional office. Then Phnom Penh. The gap between what Cambodian producers make and how the world sees Cambodian products is not a quality gap. It is an infrastructure gap: records, labels, compliance, story. That gap is the work.

Damrei Angkor Hotel

Hospitality, Siem Reap. Family business, before 2021. A hotel in Siem Reap that my father owns, and Phoum Chaufea, which the family runs alongside it. Hospitality was the first business I worked in.

Princess Jenna Norodom

Personal manager, 2024 to 2025. Talent management, media positioning, storytelling, production and public image inside Cambodia's entertainment, royal and cultural ecosystem. Brand ambassador contracts, social strategy, public appearances, PR, and the liaison between the Royal Palace, partners and media.

BRM Agro

Brand strategy, 2026 to present. A Cambodian rice and agriculture group rooted in Kampong Thom, house brands White King Elephant, Diamond and King White Elephant, moving from local farms to the United States, Europe and beyond. First international pavilion at SIAL Paris, October 2026. Twelve pieces written for BRM Agro.

Moo Moo Farms

Group operations, 2024 to present. Cambodia's first dairy farm, founded around 2015 and acquired by our group in 2024 with 100 plus underfed cows. The herd is being rebuilt toward a thousand head. The operation runs on self-hosted ERPNext and Frappe, rebuilt so that every screen a stocker touches at six in the morning makes the wrong entry difficult rather than merely discouraged.

Seekers

Brand and storytelling, ongoing. A Cambodian spirits house building premium brands rooted in modern Cambodian identity: Seekers, Jason Kong, Fuzzy Logic, Chanthy, wine in progress. The public face rebuilt page by page, a canonical entity record with awards, coordinates and real opening hours, a live Wikidata entry.

Field Watch

Agriculture, software, satellite. A monitoring platform for contract farming: roughly 2,000 farmers across about 10,000 hectares of rice in Kampong Thom, every farmer, plot and field visit in one system, plots mapped as real boundaries, built to take Sentinel-2 imagery and burn detection, in Khmer and English, offline first for a field officer's phone.

How I work

  • Count it before you have an opinion about it.
  • The back of the package matters more than the front.
  • Whoever does the work should see their own work.
  • Concentrated blocks, not continuous attention.
  • Build the tool rather than ask for the number.

The craft

Systems: ERP configuration, custom internal pages, stock and delivery workflows, reporting a non-accountant can read. Surfaces: packaging artwork through to print-ready plates, bilingual and Khmer layout, export compliance panels, websites. Story: brand positioning, campaign work, pitch decks, export communication.

Now, August 2026

  • Preparing a Cambodian rice brand for SIAL Paris in October: catalogue, sample pouches, pavilion panels.
  • Rebuilding a dairy herd toward roughly a thousand head, and the system that has to count them honestly.
  • Building Field Watch, in Khmer and English from day one.
  • Keeping a short list of where I actually eat and drink, five cities so far.

Contact: ksovandarapor@gmail.com