Overseas investment at €2.2Bn in Q1

Portugal has attracted €2.2Bn of inward overseas investment since the start of the year, according to the Minister of the Economy, António Costa Silva.

The man who in 2020 was appointed Portugal’s economic recovery Tsar in charge of drawing up a roadmap for economic modernisation and digitalisation (Portugal Resilience and Recovery Plan) highlighted the dynamism of Portugal’s foreign direct investment sector and even said that despite the Ukraine and energy crises, could enjoy a much more robust performance than had been expected.
“In the first two months of this year alone we managed to attract a net balance of €2.2Bn of overseas investment which corresponds to one-third of the whole FDI investment we achieved in 2021 when we beat our record,” said Costa Silva.
In 2021 AICEP attracted €2.7Bn in FDI and Portugal’s GDP has risen 6.4% so far in 2022 even though technically the economy has stagnated.
“Despite the great difficulties companies and the economy have been facing, there are now signs that give some hope that we might finally be turning the corner” he said, adding that there were “relevant signs” in Q1 when we had a GDP growth of around 11.9% in like-for-like terms which had a lot to do with “an increase in private consumption and net external demand, in particular tourism and services”, said Costa Silva.
Quarter-on-quarter growth was 2.6%. “If in the next quarters we can sustain growth, this year we could see a more robust economy than we had thought”, said António Costa Silva.