Mexico Attracts Companies, Not Necessarily New Industries

Even so, greater diversification does not necessarily imply the addition of more major industries. Countries differ widely in how they distribute their industrial footprint, but the industries that sustain it are far less diverse. And that shared structure has one common denominator: manufacturing. It is the leading activity for most of the countries analyzed and ranks among the top three industries for virtually all of them. Consumer goods and transportation and logistics complete the group of activities that most frequently sustain the international industrial footprint in Mexico.

Consequently, Mexico’s international industrial footprint appears to expand primarily through the addition of new participants to well-established industries rather than through the emergence of new industries. By extension, this suggests that greater geographic diversification of investment does not necessarily entail greater diversification among the major industries receiving it. This does not imply, however, that those industries remain static. Their composition can continue evolving through the addition of new activities, processes, or specializations within each industry, even as the broad industry categories that concentrate the international footprint remain relatively stable.

To learn more about industrial real estate indicators and market analysis in Mexico, visit SiiLA Market Analytics or contact us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ The effective number of industries was estimated as the inverse of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (1/HHI), a standard transformation that expresses concentration as the equivalent number of industries with equal shares. This allows industrial concentration to be interpreted as a number of industries without altering the information contained in the HHI.

² The analysis was prepared using SiiLA’s industrial inventory for Q2 2026. After validating and standardizing a database of 9,446 records, SiiLA estimated the distribution of occupied GLA by country and industry and, from it, the share of the leading industry, the combined share of the two industries with the largest occupied area, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), the effective number of industries (1/HHI), and the minimum number of industries required to account for 80% of occupied GLA. To prevent the indicators from being dominated by countries with only a marginal presence in the Mexican market, the analysis was limited to countries with at least ten distinct tenants. The resulting sample includes 26 countries, 5,152 unique companies, and 98.6% of the occupied industrial GLA recorded in the database. The concentration metrics showed a high degree of consistency with one another (Spearman’s ρ between 0.80 and 0.98), confirming that the findings do not depend on a single concentration indicator.

³ The relationship between the scale of industrial footprint and diversification was estimated using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. A positive association was observed both between the industrial GLA occupied by companies from each country and their level of diversification (ρ = 0.56; p < 0.00001), and between the number of tenants and diversification (ρ = 0.68; p < 0.00001). These associations describe a general pattern and do not imply a causal relationship.