(Bloomberg) -- Foreign investments in Israel picked up in the first half of 2024, even as the country was engulfed in a multifront war in Gaza and Lebanon and traded direct fire with Iran.
Overseas trade deals between January and June totaled $11.8 billion, Israel’s finance ministry said in its annual foreign investments report published 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, said.
Israel’s Government Confident Worst Is Over for War-Hit Economy
Discounting the Intel investment, overall foreign trade deals in 2023 came to $17.9 billion, Israel’s lowest level since 2019.
The drop in foreign investment to Israel in 2023 was slightly bigger than the 20% global decline reported by the OECD that year, mostly because of turmoil brought on by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the judiciary and the ongoing war triggered by the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
In 2023, the US was the leading source country for investments in Israel with $24 billion followed by France with $3.7 billion, India with $1.2 billion and the UK with $1.1 billion.
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 a $1.2 billion investment by India’s Adani Group in the port of Haifa.
Almost half the investments were in the semiconductor and chip industry, followed by investments in IT and life sciences.
(Updates to add leading source countries in sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected 2023 global, Israel declines in fourth paragraph)
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.