President Felipe Nyusi has announced that Mozambique received more than US$10 billion in foreign investments across a range of sectors between 2019 and 2023, while calling on businesses to diversify their export destinations.
Speaking at the 59th Maputo International Fair (Facim), the largest goods and services exhibition in the country, Nyusi outlined how foreign investments over the past four years have gone to energy (40 percent), tourism (18 percent), industry (15 percent), services (14 percent) and construction (5 percent). He also devoted part of his opening speech to calling on firms to diversify the destinations for their products, noting current preferences for India, South Africa, China, the UK, Italy, South Korea, Croatia, Thailand and Singapore.
Facim, which welcomed 3,300 exhibitors from 26 countries, of which 2,300 companies are Mozambican and 750 foreign, runs until 1 September in the province of Maputo.
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Nyusi credited a large part of the recent investments to economic acceleration measures, highlighting the reduction of the value added tax in January 2023 and the visa exemption for 29 countries instituted in 2023.
He cited the GDP for first quarter 2024 as illustrating the impact of diversified investing, noting the figures for agriculture and related activities (31.5 percent); extractive industry (10.5 percent); transport, storage and communications (8.5 percent; trade and repair services (8 percent) and industry (7 percent). The same period saw moderate economic growth of 3.2 percent, below the 5.5 percent of the annual forecast.
Nyusi attributed the lower figure to the “bias of contractionary monetary policy measures” leading to a dynamic where low inflation combines with solid economic growth trends as well as “exports alongside exchange rate stability.”
