Portugal expects €2Bn in overseas investment
The Portuguese government says that contracts worth nearly €2Bn in direct foreign investment will be signed in the coming months.
The DFI will mostly be in the car component, aeronautics and agricultural sectors.
This time last year, the Government set a target that DFI should represent 65% of GDP by 2020.
And according to the Government’s overseas investment agency AICEP Portugal Global, 2018 was “a great year in terms of investment” and the “best year in 10 years”, so is on track to meet that challenge.
In an interview with Jornal Económico, Eurico Brilhante Dias said that last year Portugal closed with €2.7Bn of investment from both Portugal and overseas, from 20 different areas.
The minister for Internationalisation said that there had been investment too that the Government had not signed contracts for, but had flooded in on the merits of the country itself and had not depended on financial or fiscal incentives.
The Minister for Internationalisation gave the examples of Google, Daimler Trucks, Volkswagen and Cisco which while supported and facilitated by AICEP, was not the result of government sweeteners.
Brilhante Dias said that over the past parliament 40,000 new jobs had been created and 136,000 retained and that the aforementioned overseas investors alone represented 10% of those new jobs (1,350 from Google, 300 from VW, 200 from Cisco and 500 from Critical Tech Works) and to which a further 4,000 jobs could be added.
“Because these companies are very intellectual capital intensive, very often they don’t involve huge investments but they do create lots of qualified jobs which is one of our main objectives,” said Brilhante Dias.
For 2019, the Minister said that the amount of investment contracted via AICEP, in terms of Gross Fixed Capital, represented 70% in terms of variation of the last four years.
“We currently have in the pipeline around €2Bn of investment which we expect to materialise over the next two years. I would say that for 2019 we could see a value very close to the record amount we saw in 2018 in which we signed around €1.1Bn” the minister said.