Israel Sees More Foreign Investments Despite Wars
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
JERUSALEM (Worthy News) – Foreign investments reportedly increased in Israel despite the Jewish nation’s multifront war in Gaza and Lebanon as well its confrontations with Iran and groups in Syria and Yemen.
In the first half of this year, overseas investments totaled $11.8 billion, an increase of 15 percent over the same period of 2023, said Israel’s finance ministry in its annual foreign investments report published on Tuesday.
Excluding a one-off $15 billion investment by the US’s Intel Corporation, total deals in the first half of 2023 amounted to $7.3 billion by comparison.
“The data for 2024 shows an increasing trend in foreign investment transactions to Israel, and we expect the improvement in the security and political environment to support this trend moving forward,” Shmuel Abramzon, chief economist at Israel’s finance ministry, added.
Discounting the Intel investment, foreign trade deals in 2023 reportedly reached $17.9 billion, Israel’s lowest level since 2019.
The biggest foreign investment deals of 2023 were Intel’s investment at the company’s wafer fabrication site in Kiryat Gat, south of Tel Aviv, the merger of Imperva Inc. with French corporation Thales SA, which totaled around $3.6 billion, and India’s Adani Group’s $1.2 billion investment in the port of Haifa.
CHIP INDUSTRY
The report showed that almost half the investments were in the semiconductor and chip industry, followed by investments in information technology (IT) and life sciences.
Bloomberg News agency and Israel’s financial newspaper Globes first reported Tuesday’s figures.
Bloomberg News concluded that the drop in foreign investment in Israel last year was slightly bigger than the 20 percent global decline reported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
That decline was mainly linked to the ongoing war triggered by the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed some 1,200 people.
The upheaval over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to reform the judiciary was also attributed to the temporary reduction in foreign investments last year.
Yet as Israel fought back, foreign investments picked up amid “the improvement in the security and diplomatic environment,” stresses Abramzon.
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