Madrid Investment Attraction (MIA), the foreign investment attraction office affiliated to the Madrid City Department of Economics, has just opened its new office in Mexico.

The latest figures reported by the Foreign Investment Register (RIE) for the first half of 2022 give an investment figure of 10.927 billion in Madrid, accounting for 69.8% of the total in Spain. These figures almost double those obtained by the region of Madrid in the first half of 2021. Madrid is continuing to attract more companies and investment than anywhere else in Spain, making it one of the main European and global destinations for productive investment.

Mexico’s investment in Madrid

According to data provided by the Department’s Investment Register, Spain has received productive investment flows of 13.163 billion euros from Mexico since 1993. This makes it the biggest Latin American investor in Spain and the tenth biggest investor worldwide, accounting for 2.4% of the total inbound investment.  50.7% of Mexican investment flows to Spain, 6.668 billion euros, have been made in the Region of Madrid. Mexico is the twelfth largest investor in the region and the largest Latin American investor, accounting for 2.0% of inbound investment.

51.1% of Mexican productive investment in Madrid is concentrated in the Services sector, followed by 39.8% in Industry and 8.2% in Construction. Especially significant are Mexican investments in Real Estate Activities (€1.402Bn, 22.0% of the total, especially visible from 2012 onwards), the Food Industry (€1.368Bn, 21.5%, with peak activity in 2014 and 2015), Cement (€1.048Bn, 16.5%, concentrated in 2005 and 2007) and Financial Services (€900M,14.1%)

Mexico is the seventh biggest investor in Madrid in terms of employment, representing 4.6% of the total, behind France, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, subsidiaries of Spanish companies abroad, and the Netherlands. Mexican companies maintain 33,364 direct jobs in Spain, after strong growth (+31) in the last year for which data are available (2020), thanks to the strong uptick in employment in the waste collection sector during the year. This figure is five times higher (+407%) than in 2007. With these figures, Mexico is the twelfth largest creator of local employment, the largest in Latin America, with 2.0% of the total. Madrid is the region with the highest volume of such employment in Spain (70.0% of the total, 23,341 jobs).

In the last available year (2020), Mexican employment levels in Madrid increased by 47%. The evolution of employment has been very significant since 2007 (+1,452% since that year), when there were only 1,503 jobs linked to Mexican investments, especially since 2016 (the first year in which 10,000 jobs were exceeded).