Foreign investment in Catalonia grows 26% but the community falls to third place in the ranking

Foreign investment in Catalonia grew by 26% last year, although the community fell to third place in the ranking, surpassed by the Basque Country in a statistic that Madrid has led for years.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
21 March 2023 Tuesday 05:24
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Foreign investment in Catalonia grows 26% but the community falls to third place in the ranking

Foreign investment in Catalonia grew by 26% last year, although the community fell to third place in the ranking, surpassed by the Basque Country in a statistic that Madrid has led for years. Specifically, foreign companies allocated 3,883 million euros to the Catalan community. It is 11.1% of the total that is invested in Spain.

This statistic is not always a good indicator to show the strength of one community or another since sometimes the investments are assigned mainly to Madrid because it is in the capital where most of the multinationals' headquarters are located. This is what happened in 2018 when the purchase of Abertis by the Italian Atlantia and the German firm Hochtief, owned by ACS, triggered investment in Madrid and not in Catalonia because the company had just moved its headquarters to the capital after the independence referendum.

Investments made from Spain by a foreign company are not adequately reflected in the statistics either. For example, if Seat, based in Martorell, makes an investment with its own resources, it is not counted, but if it is carried out with money from Volkswagen's German parent company, it is counted.

Economists who have been analyzing data on foreign investment for years believe that long periods must be studied in order to draw trends. In the period 2018-2022, the average investment in Catalonia was 3,673 million, 10.7% of all of Spain. It is the second community receiving more resources after Madrid.

Last year the Madrid community received 21.5% less than in 2021. In addition, the 17,226 million received are below the annual average for the period, which is 24,312 million. In addition, last year Madrid took 50.4% of all investment in Spain compared to 70.8% on average for the five previous years.

Foreign investment exceeded 34,178 million euros last year in gross terms, which is the second highest figure reached since figures were available, according to data published this Monday by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce.

This amount represents an increase of 13.9% compared to 2021. In addition, more than 87% of foreign investments went to unlisted companies.

The Generalitat de Catalunya also publishes each year the foreign investments in Catalonia that it manages. The multinationals AstraZeneca, Microsoft, MPS, Florette or Lauda Ultracool, along with 89 others, raised foreign investment in Catalonia captured by the Generalitat to 620 million. This is a slightly higher figure than the previous year (it grows by 1.2%), thus standing at the record level.

In net terms, that is, foreign investments minus their liquidations, the number of investments outside of Foreign Securities Holding Entities reached 23,892 million euros, 9.8% more than in 2021.

Geographically, the United States was the main investor in Spain and concentrated 27.7% of the issuance of non-ETVE investment flows received in our country. After him came the United Kingdom (with 17.8% of the investment), Germany (14%), France (10%), Australia (4%) and the Netherlands (3%).

By sectors, more than half of the total foreign investment in Spain (55.1%) went to the services sector, followed by the industry sector (42.2%) and, later, by construction (2.5%) and the primary sector (0.2%). The manufacturing sector, for its part, exceeded 10,111 million euros, which is a record.

The performance of the telecommunications sector was also noteworthy, it received more than 2,713 million, the best data in the last 10 years; renewable energies, which as a whole received more than 2,800 million, of which 872 million went to wind (third best data in the historical series) and 1,971 to solar (fourth best data in the series); and that of programming and computing, which reached a figure of 1,400 million, the second best data in the series after 2021.

"These data show the strength of the Spanish economy and the enormous confidence that foreign investors have in our country," said the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, Reyes Maroto, in a statement before stressing that these investments have been made " in a very complex global context” by the war in Ukraine.

"In this difficult and uncertain international context, Spain offers security and certainty thanks to the deployment of the ambitious investment and reform agenda that the Government has launched through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan," he added.