Foreign investors from Serbia are taking out more money than they are investing in it

According to data published by the National Bank of Serbia (NBS), in the first five months of 2025, the balance of payments based on foreign direct investment (FDI) has drastically decreased.

This means that foreigners have taken out more money from our country in the form of profits and interest than they have brought in through new investments, writes business consultant Dejan Cirkovic from the consulting firm Virtus Partners.

His words are confirmed by official data on the annual decline in foreign direct investment inflows of 67.5% in the period from January to May 2025. Specifically, the inflow fell from EUR 1,943 million in the first five months of 2024 to EUR 631 million in the same period this year.

The same data also show that the outflow of investments from the country doubled during that period. Cirkovic lists the trend of inflows in recent years in detail.

Investment inflows amounted to EUR 1.7 billion in 2020, EUR 2 billion in 2021, EUR 1.5 billion in 2022, EUR 1.2 billion in 2023, and EUR 0.6 billion in 2024.

According to him, companies from the FDI corpus earned more than 50% of the total profit of the entire Serbian economy last year.

"According to APR data, the total result of companies in 2024 amounted to around EUR 7.4 billion (around 110,000 companies), while the dividends paid and reinvested profits of FDI companies (together making up the total result of their operations) amounted to around EUR 4.2 billion. So, 56% of the total profit of the Serbian economy," he wrote on his Linkedin profile.

Until recently, their share in the total profit of the economy was around one third, but last year, FDI, i.e. foreign companies, earned more than half of the total profit of all companies in Serbia.

It is also interesting that the profits of FDI companies in 2024 increased by 30%, while those of domestic companies fell by 40%. As Cirkovic explains, this shows that we have exhausted the growth model based on foreign direct investment.

He adds that the influx of money from abroad has so far allowed us to live above our economic means and import more than we export, because we have supplemented this difference with foreign direct investment, borrowing and remittances from the diaspora.

However, as things stand now, such a policy will have to change, warns this business consultant, adding that the state should increase support to Serbian companies in the future, but also improve regulations, all in order to improve the economic environment.

Narodna banka Srbije Beograd

National Bank of Serbia

Dejan Cirkovic

money

foreign investments