Tunisia reports sharp increase of foreign investments in 2017

TUNIS, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Foreign investments in Tunisia increased by 12.8 percent to reach more than 2,244 million dinars in 2017 (a dinar is worth 0.41 dollar), announced the Foreign Investment Promotion Agency (FIPA) of Tunisia on Wednesday.

These FDI (Foreign Direct Investments) are divided into portfolio investments and foreign direct investments (FDI), with respective growth of 32.3 percent and 11.9 percent in 2017.

In Tunisia, the structure of FDI is largely based on the manufacturing sector (46 percent), followed by energy (38 percent), services (15 percent) and agriculture (1 percent).

According to FIPA, the manufacturing sector has provided the lion's share of foreign investments over the past year with a value of 974.3 million dinars or 21.6 percent growth compared with 2016.

"The good performance of the industrial sector is essentially attributable to the performance of certain sectors such as electronics industries, electrical fibers and more specifically the automotive and aerospace components," said Hatem Soussi, Director of supervision and monitoring of foreign companies under (FIPA).

The growth of foreign investments in the services sector reached 13 percent with an envelope of 318.3 million dinars. However, this sector still shows a default of 24.5 percent and 29.7 percent respectively compared to 2015 and 2014, according to the same source.

However, the energy sector has a relatively slowdown in foreign investments, since growth is estimated at only 1.7 percnet throughout the year 2017 for a value of 810 million dinars.

Excluding energy, FIPA was able to count on all the previous year about 492 foreign investments for an envelope of 1,318.2 million dinars, generating 10,300 direct jobs. Enditem