RIYADH — There has been a significant increase in the inflow of foreign investments into Saudi Arabia last year. The net foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Kingdom jumped 20.2% to about $ 5.49 billion during the year 2020, compared to about $4.56 billion in the previous year, according to preliminary and estimated data of the Saudi Central Bank (SCB). The flow of FDI soared 80 percent, reaching $1.87 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, against $1.04 billion in the same quarter of 2019. The remarkable achievements of Saudi Arabia are significant while comparing to a big fall in FDI at the global level. According to a report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), there was a collapse of global foreign direct investment in 2020, dropping by 42 percent to an estimated $859 billion from $1.5 trillion in 2019. In its previous report, UNCTAD stated that FDIs in Saudi Arabia amounted to $4.7 billion in 2020, indicating that the Saudi government's policies related to investment promotion are beginning to show positive results. According to a previous data released by SCB, there has been an increase in net FDIs in Saudi Arabia by 1.3 percent during the first nine months of 2020, reaching about SR13.351 billion ($3.56 billion) as against SR13.184 billion ($3.51 billion) in the same period of 2019. The net FDIs in the Kingdom reached SR3.876 billion ($1.034 billion) during the third quarter of 2020, an increase of 13.25 percent compared to SR3.424 billion ($ 913 million) in the second quarter of the same year. The rate of foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia increased by 7.9 percent during the first half of 2020, reaching $ 2.56 billion while compared to about $2.37 billion, a decrease of 49 percent in global FDI flows during the same period, the Ministry of Investment said in a previous report, quoting the figures of UNCTAD.
