Productive investment soars in Mexico

If it is not him nearshoringWell, then it will be a miracle of the Holy Child of Atocha, but productive investment in Mexico is growing like we had never seen before.

The INEGI announced yesterday that gross fixed investment grew in Mexico at an annual rate of 28.6 percent in June.

Furthermore, it is completely unprecedented that the so-called investment in ‘non-residential construction’that is, the construction of infrastructure, plants, warehouses, shopping centers and others, had a growth of 70.3 percent at an annual rate.

The level of investment that was made in June was 17 percent higher than that made in December of last year and is growing month after month.

The level reached It’s an all-time high and it already has an amount higher by 13.9 percent in relation to the highest level that had been registered before this year, which was in June 2018.

Perhaps some might think that the reason for this strong growth is that the government is investing strongly in infrastructure works such as the Mayan Train, the Dos Bocas refinery or the Interoceanic Corridor.

That investment contributes something, yes. But it is not enough to explain the global behavior of this variable.

According to data from the Ministry of Finance, in the month of July, physical investment in the public sector grew at a rate of 29 percent.

But, it must be remembered that the public sector only represents 15 percent of total investment, so that increase represented about 4 percentage points of the 28 percent investment growth.

The reality is now inescapable, although it is not yet expressed in the foreign investment data, and reflects that Mexico is experiencing a completely different stage than the one we experienced in previous years, with a shot of industrial construction and equipment purchase.

Even Mexican companies are making investments in anticipation of the demand that will arise in the future due to the industrial relocation process.

It is ABC of the economy that economic dynamism is fundamentally based on investment performance, since consumption, the other large component of demand, tends to move more smoothly.

This is also seen in the number of private consumption for June that the INEGI revealed yesterday, which, although it is very positive and was 4.1 percent At an annual rate, it is far from the pace that maintains productive investment.

This process it will still take a few months to be reflected in the volumes of foreign direct investment. And perhaps it will also be reflected little by little in manufacturing exports, although in the case of Automotive industryin which the growth of its sales abroad in July was 35 percent, It is already a reality.

And Mexico is clearly consolidating itself as the main automotive supplier of our neighbor to the north.

Analysts who watch this process carefully will have no choice but to continue revising GDP growth expectations upwards, both for this year and for 2024.

Recently, the rating agency Moody’s has already modified its estimate to 3.3 percent for the end of this year.

The average of the experts, in the monthly measurement of Banxico, already defines a figure of 3.0 percent, and rest assured that it will continue to rise.

What until a few months ago was anecdotal evidence that more and more investments were arrivingare becoming clear realities.

The strength with which this investment is coming is impressive. But if we can’t get past the bottlenecks that exist, it could eventually stall.

I reiterate what I have told you on other occasions when the topic has been addressed in this space: if we do nothing or do little, Mexico will do well with the nearshoring; But if we remove the obstacles so that investments arrive and are installed, this process can completely change the face of the Mexican economy in the next five years.