Mexico's government had every reason to lead with one number in 2025: a record US$40.87 billion in foreign direct investment, up 10.8% from the prior year, the fifth straight annual increase. That's the headline every nearshoring story ran with. It's also, per Mexico's own central bank, a headline that ended its year in negative territory — and the composition underneath it tells a more complicated story than "nearshoring boom" alone.
The record, and what's actually inside it
The Secretaría de Economía confirmed the $40.87 billion 2025 total, an increase of 10.8% year over year. But FDI isn't one uniform thing, and the breakdown matters: reinvestment of profits — money foreign companies already operating in Mexico chose to keep in the country rather than repatriate — accounted for roughly 68% of the total, about $27.6 billion, itself down 3.7% from 2024 (which the Economy Ministry attributed to companies distributing more dividends instead). New investment, the category closest to genuinely new capital entering the country, made up about 18% of the total, roughly $7.38 billion — but grew nearly 133% year over year, the fastest-growing piece of the pie even as it remains a minority share.
The negative quarter Banxico's own data shows
Here's the number that complicates the "steady nearshoring momentum" framing: Banco de México's data puts Q4 2025 FDI at -$7.08 billion — a record quarterly low, and an outright negative outflow. FDI does tend to dip seasonally in Mexico's second and fourth quarters, so a Q4 decline alone wouldn't be unusual — but a negative headline figure of this size means the year's record total was front-loaded into earlier quarters, not a smooth trend that was still accelerating as 2025 closed.
Where the investment is actually going
The clearest evidence that "nearshoring" doesn't mean "factories are rising across northern Mexico" uniformly is the execution data: 41.3% of companies that announced Mexico investments between 2023 and 2025 had not yet begun physical construction as of the most recent tracking. Announcements and ground-breaking are separate events, and that gap is precisely where the difference lives between a genuine investment cycle and an unfulfilled pipeline of press releases.
The USMCA cloud, more precisely stated
Government representatives from the US, Mexico, and Canada held the mandatory USMCA joint review virtually on July 1, 2026. The outcome is more nuanced than either "renewed" or "collapsed": Mexico and Canada each confirmed support for extending the agreement for another 16-year term, but the United States did not agree to renew it in its current form. Practically, nothing changes immediately — the agreement remains legally in force through its scheduled 2036 expiration, and current trade rules are unaffected today. What the non-renewal does trigger is a new phase of annual reviews over the next decade, meaning the uncertainty that shows up in every "will nearshoring survive USMCA" headline is now a recurring annual event rather than a one-time cliff that has already been resolved either way.
The honest read
None of this means Mexico's nearshoring investment thesis is failing — a genuine 133% jump in new investment and a fifth consecutive year of FDI growth are real signals, not noise. But the government's own $100 billion-per-year-by-2030 target under Plan México is a goal roughly 2.4x larger than what 2025 actually delivered, the year's record was unevenly distributed with a negative Q4, over 40% of announced projects hadn't broken ground as of the latest count, and the trade framework everything depends on now faces a decade of annual re-litigation instead of a settled 16-year horizon. The record headline and the front-loaded, execution-gapped, trade-uncertain reality underneath it are both true at once — which is exactly why neither the boosters nor the skeptics get to have the whole story.
Sources: Mexico News Daily on the 2025 FDI record, Mexico Business News on the FDI composition, Trading Economics on Banxico's Q4 2025 FDI data, White & Case on the USMCA 2026 joint review outcome, USTR statement on the USMCA joint review, CSIS on the USMCA review, UNCTAD Investment Policy Hub on Plan México, Mexico Business News on USMCA uncertainty and GDP risk.
