South America vies with SA for FDI

ED RICHARDSON
SOUTH AMERICA has become another global competitor with South Africa for foreign direct investment (FDI). This is according to a recent KPMG International report which found that South America seemed set to emerge from a period of economic under-performance as manufacturing investment started to flow back into some of the continent’s leading economies. “There is a feel from those interviewed that the continent as a whole has benefited from the difficulties which some companies have experienced in establishing themselves in the emerging Asian economies, something which has prompted them to look more favourably at South America,” says John Guy, head of industrial & automotive products at KPMG in the UK. “In the immediate post-war period, the entire South American region was widely seen as a coming economic superpower, much as China is today. It may be that we are now returning to that earlier view of the world. South America is once again poised to become a source of growth and innovation in the world economy and to potentially become a destination of choice for the world’s cash-rich corporations to invest their capital,” he says.