In terms of investments, How different will 2026 be compared to 2025? This week we have the announcements of 1,000 million dollars from General Motors and 1,300 million from Pilgrim’s, along with data from INEGI: between January and October of last year, investment fell 5.9% compared to the same period last year.
The behavior of investment in 2026 will determine, to a large extent, what happens to GDP and job creation. The fall in investment is behind the very poor 0.4 or 0.5% growth in 2025 and the poor formal employment generation figures: around 70,000, if we leave platform workers out of the picture.
Last year, public investment plummeted. The data for the first 10 months of the year register –20.2%. Since Ernesto Zedillo’s first year we had not had behavior like this. Investment was one of the adjustment variables of public finances, in the effort to reduce the deficit of 5.9% of GDP left by López Obrador.
Private investment also had a negative behavior in 2025. The drop in the first 10 months of the year was 4.9%. This decline occurred, despite the fact that there was a record amount of foreign investment. Only in the first nine months of the year, 40.9 billion dollars had been registered in that area.
What’s next? “Mexico must get out of its investment limbo to restart its (re)nearshoring narrative,” says a Morgan Stanley report. Interesting that you talk about limbo. With a record of foreign investment, we cannot speak of paradise, because the national part is in that area where it is very hot and you breathe a smell of sulfur. To put it in context, foreign investment is approximately 10% of total investment. Nine out of every 10 pesos of investment is national, private or public.
Only 39.5% of companies consider that it is a good time to invest, reveals a survey carried out by Coparmex, in which 3,850 companies in the 32 states participated. The survey was conducted between August 20 and October 20 of last year, although it was presented on Wednesday, January 14. 39.5% is a level similar to that found in the survey during the pandemic. “The lower willingness responds to economic uncertainty, insecurity and political environment,” says the Coparmex statement.
How much have things changed from October 20 to date? In what direction has economic uncertainty, insecurity and the political environment moved? It remains impressive that “optimism” is at a level similar to what it was with the pandemic. Economic uncertainty has not dissipated. The White House does not give a truce or guarantee that the T-MEC will survive. Perhaps we will be left with a zombie agreement, more or less in line with the times in which we live. Insecurity doesn’t give up either. The Coparmex survey says that 46.8% of companies were victims of a crime. Theft of goods in transit was the most frequent, followed by extortion, vehicle theft and computer crimes.
Can you get out of investment limbo? The boost cannot come from public investment, because in that box, the Government has very little room for maneuver. Debt service payments continue to grow, as do the resources dedicated to social programs. Where the Government could make a difference is by sending signals to entrepreneurs to invest: clear rules and legal certainty, for example. Last week’s meeting between the Secretary of Energy, Luz Elena González, and the CCE draws attention. There was an open invitation/exhortation to businessmen to invest. Something that was not seen between 2018 and 2024.
Mexico needs to detonate private investment and it needs to do it now. In areas such as energy and infrastructure, the challenge is to “lock in” investments in 2026 so that projects start as soon as possible. The rush is explained because investments in energy and infrastructure are a necessary condition for other investments to occur. The current capacity in electricity and water are bottlenecks, the rules of the game do not help. Be careful: there are investment announcements, but what we capture is far below our potential. Mexico receives less than half the foreign investment that Brazil.
Latin America could experience a spring in terms of investment and economic growth, says Morgan Stanley in its analysis LatAm Spring: Imagine LatAm’s Bull Case in a Multipolar World. He talks about Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico. Explains why the international situation could benefit Latin American countries that do their homework in terms of generating private investment.
The world is changing and Mexico could be one of the winners in the new global disorder. The question is Can we get out of the investment limbo in which we are trapped?
