Trade Horizons’ Market Entry Blog

2023 is set to be a big year for Photonics, the science and technology of light. Applications extend to lasers, screens, lamps, semiconductors and medical instruments. Laser can be used to cut or stencil hard or uneven surfaces to minute detail with functions in manufacturing, technology and medicine. Optical fibres communicate sound and binary data across distances in our communication networks. Lidar in the robotics world is light that is used to remote control robots for equipment maintenance and virtual reality training.

2022 broke records for Spain for greenfield foreign investments due to sustainability and green energy projects. Spain’s economy had the largest contraction in the Euorozone due to COVID at 11% in 2020 but grew 5.1% in 2021 funded by €140bn from Next Generation EU recovery funds. Spain has a high level of public debt and a large pension load due to the ageing population. Spain permits up to 100% of foreign ownership in a company. It reported 827 greenfield projects in 2021. Its largest investor is Switzerland followed by the US, the UK and France. A green economy remains high on Spanish priority lists and renewable energy projects accounted for the bulk of investments in 2022. Hydrogen production was announced in Spain’s National Energy and Climate Plan (“NECP”) as a key focus due to the topical landscape of sunny & windy hillsides being perfect for hydrogen production plants.

Reuters says that Britain will lag behind global competitors in 2023 due to the recession, lack of Brexit recovery and inflation. UK’s GDP is forecast to grow slower than all the other G7 nations. 2022 was the worst year for Government debt since 1994 for Britain. The UK attracted 1,589 FDI projects in 2021-22 of which 38% were new investments with the remainder being mergers & acquisitions or expansions of existing projects. The number of projects has basically remained stagnant since 2018 but is a decrease from 2017-18. However, 85,000 new jobs were created out of inward FDI projects in 2021-22 which is more jobs than other years (data since 2017). The most projects went to London (444) with 444 to the rest of England, 119 to Scotland, 43 to Wales and 32 to Ireland. Britain’s largest investor is the United States followed by India and then Germany.

The United States topped inward investment into Europe charts in 2020 with US investments accounting for a quarter of foreign inward investment in Europe. The US invested €752 billion out of a total €2 990 billion in 2020. The next largest investor was Germany followed by France and the United Kingdom. In 2021, Netherlands was the second largest recipient of outward FDI from the United States, with Japan topping the list at number 1. Canada was third followed by the UK then Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and France.

2021 saw German companies investing $1.6 billion in Africa which is a drop from 2016-2020 at $9.7bn and much less than France or the UK. Headlines report the number should be higher – only 1% of Germany’s global FDI ends up in Africa. China’s investments increase 40x year on year, but that has not been without its own issues. We also read that the new EU initiative Global Gateway which would rival the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. The new Global Gateway would invest Euro 150 billion in the African market. We also read about Germany’s approach to Namibia to fund a Euro 10 billion green hydrogen fund which would ship clean energy to Europe. This would diversity the green energy supply chain away from China which dominates the market as a producer of materials such as solar panels. Since the Ukraine war Germany has reduced energy reliance on Russia drastically as of when Russia turned off the pipeline. Germany needs to import 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen in 2025 if green hydrogen is to work, and has approached major African nations.

In 2019 EU signed the ‘Mercosur’ trade pact with 4 South American countries Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay after 20 years of negotiations. The deal was reportedly held up due to Brazil’s former Prime Minster Bolsonaro’s poor preservation of the Amazon rainforest. Brazil’s new Prime Minister has said he will preserve the Amazon rainforest which EU chiefs have said would lead to the signing of the deal. However, Argentina’s President says the environment was an excuse and Brazil and Argentina did not agree to the terms which would damage the car industry in those two countries. He says the deal is unbalanced and would severely affect the car industry but also would not give South America access to sell agricultural products into Europe. Argentina and Brazil want to reopen negotiations.