In 2022, foreign direct investment from Spain to Mexico fell by 61 percent

Braulio Carvajal

La Jornada newspaper
Sunday, March 19, 2023, p. 26

Foreign direct investments (FDI) from Spain to Mexico in 2022 fell by 61 percent compared to 2021, moving the Iberian country from second to sixth place among the countries with the largest investments in our country, the data reveals. This is in the context of tension between the two governments.

Figures released by the Ministry of the Economy (SE) show that between January and December 2022 Spanish companies invested directly in Mexico a total of $1,637 million, barely a third of the $4,382 million they recorded in 2021. Or the 4,23 million reported in 2021. 2021. 2020.

Foreign direct investment from Spain in 2022 is far from the record $6.5 billion set in 2004, the year that Vicente Fox was president of Mexico.

In 2022, the Iberian country had the sixth-highest rate of foreign direct investment in Mexico, meaning a collapse from the second place it had the previous year. Last year it was surpassed by the United States ($15 billion), Canada ($3.8 billion), Argentina ($2.3 billion), Japan ($1.8 billion), and the United Kingdom ($1.8 billion).

This fall comes at a time when President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has indicated those ties with Spain pause.

In February last year, the president proposed at one of his morning conferences to break off relations with Spain; which he soon after made clear was not a rupture, but a fraternal protest against the corporations of that country, and to which he referred on several occasions. Maltreatment For several years in collusion with the previous governments.

Faced with such statements, the Spanish government said it categorically rejects the Mexican president’s stepping down against Spanish companies, stressing his desire to have a relationship based on mutual respect.

Since there are records, that is, since 1999 until now, Mexico has acquired 674 thousand 500 million dollars of foreign direct investment, the United States was the main partner with 312 thousand 500 million and Spain the second with a total of 80 thousand 24 million dollars. While Canada ranked third, its other major trading partner, with about $50 billion.

The importance of foreign direct investment from Spain to Mexico is that about 7,000 companies from that country are present in Mexican territory, with prominent participation in core sectors of the economy such as finance, media, construction, communications and energy.

It stands out for the presence of companies such as BBVA, Santander, Prisa, OHL, Telefónica Movistar, Iberdrola, Gas Fenosa, Repsol, Red Energy and others.

Only in the field of energy, specifically in the field of generation, transmission and distribution of electric power, Spanish companies have invested about 10 billion dollars, a figure only surpassed by the more than 35 billion dollars they have in the financial sector or 16 billion dollars. Dollars in the field of communications and information.