Concrete benefits from nearshoring investments announced this year to help companies relocate to Mexico and establish a base closer to the U.S. market may only be realized in two or three years.
Daily newspaper El Economista reported statistics compiled by consulting firm Integria Consultores that showed that 231 investment announcements worth $61.3 billion were made between January 2023 and February 2024, most of which targeted the northern border states of Sonora, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua and Coahuila.
Meanwhile, according to Forbes Mexico, Finance Minister Rogelio Ramirez de la O said at a regional event in April that “with investment announcements by international companies, we can expect to continue to see significant foreign direct investment figures this year and next, possibly even exceeding those in 2023.”
But Claudia Esteves, president of the private industrial parks association AMPIP, told BNamericas that “these investments are not coming very quickly. In other words, what is happening right now is not what the FDI figures show. When a company approaches us with the intention of investing in Mexico, we know that the project will take two or three years to materialize,” because building industrial parks takes time.
“Of course, nearshoring is a reality, but everyone has to take into account that the investments were not made in the year of the announcement and will not be reflected in this year’s numbers. That’s not reality,” Esteves said.
AMPIP represents 460 parks with 4,000 businesses in 28 states.
Demand for industrial land reached 1 million square metres in the first quarter, Esteves said. Demand is expected to reach 4 million square metres in 2024-25, compared with 3 million square metres in 2022-23, of which 20% could be related to near-shoring.
However, measuring trends through industrial land prices is not easy as prices fluctuate widely.
“There is no one cause for the price increase. Of course, there are good locations such as Juarez and Tijuana where prices have skyrocketed and may have increased by 40 to 50 percent in the last three years, and Mexico City, another top spot, but we cannot speak of a single percentage for the whole country because it varies by market and service,” she said.
“Sometimes there’s sudden news or other factors that can cause the price to fluctuate a little bit, but usually the price changes are not that sudden,” she added.
AMPIP is in contact with the team of President-elect Claudia Scheinbaum, who promised to build 100 industrial parks during her election campaign.
“Of course, we can’t build 100 industrial parks at the same time, but we can definitely do it within the six years of the next president’s term. [term]”We are working closely with her team to complete this project by the end of her term and we don’t think we will have any problem achieving it,” Esteves said.
