Cambodia has two major ports, Phnom Penh and Kampong Saom, and five minor ones. Phnom Penh, located at the junction of the Basak, the Mekong, and the Tonle Sab rivers, is the only river port capable of receiving 8,000-ton ships during the wet season and 5,000-ton ships during the dry season. It remains an important port for international commerce as well as for domestic communications.

Kampong Saom, Cambodia's only seaport, reopened in late 1979. It had been built in 1960 with French assistance. In 1980 some 180 Soviet dockworkers, having brought with them forklifts and trucks, were reportedly working at Kampong Saom as longshoremen or as instructors of unskilled Cambodian port workers. By 1984 approximately 1,500 Cambodian port workers were handling 2.5 tons of cargo per day. According to official statistics, Kampong Saom had handled only 769,500 tons in the four prior years (1979 to 1983), a level that contrasted sharply with the port's peacetime capacity of about 1 million tons of cargo per year.

Data as of December 1987