Via the Financial Times, an article on Coca Cola’s plans for the Mexican market:

Investment in Mexico: it’s the real thing. Coca-Cola’s announcement that it will pour $1bn into the country every year until 2020 is just the latest in a string of recent big-ticket spends in a country where manufacturing is leading the country out of an untimely economic slump.

The US beverage maker, whose operations in Mexico include eight bottling groups in Mexico, juices and dairy as well as sodas and water, said it would invest more than $8.4bn from 2014-2020, bringing the total invested in Mexico during the decade to $12.4bn.

“We … have been investing an average of $1bn every year, for the past 10 years and we are reaffirming this commitment until 2020,” said Francisco Crespo.

The announcement tops a month of giant investment promises for Mexico. Daimler and Nissan said late in June that they would be building a €1bn luxury car plant, followed within days by BMW’s announcement it would invest $1bn in a factory.

Car manufacturing has been a major engine of Mexican manufacturing growth and Latin America’s No. 2 economy has now overtaken its first, Brazil, as the region’s biggest carmaker.

As if the two big auto investments were not enough, just last week, Mexican business leaders pledged investments of $27bn in telecoms, mining, construction, infrastructure, auto parts, chemicals, consumer products and IT in 2014 alone.

That, the Mexican Business Council’s leader Claudio González told a ceremony attended by President Enrique Peña Nieto, was higher than last year and equivalent, to 20 car plants in a single year.

The investment plans come as data released last week showed the manufacturing sector in Mexico, which already exports more goods than the rest of the region combined, grew 3.6 per cent in May compared with the same month last year – promising news in a country where growth nosedived last year and has struggled to spark since.

Reforms in the energy sector and telecoms are also expected to unlock hefty investment ahead.