The first six months of this year saw a fall in direct investments compared to the same period last year when they totalled about USD990 million.
The head of the central bank's Statistics Department, Igor Jemric, recently explained that this was the result of the fact that reinvested profits had a substantial share in last year's overall foreign investments.
Although the largest portion of the foreign investments in the first half of this year, notably USD266.2 million, also accounted for reinvested profits, this amount was considerably smaller than at the same time last year when the retained profit was USD657.2 million.
Owner investments yielded USD213.5 million, mostly in the trade sector. In the first half of this year 37.5 per cent of owner investments accounted for non-specialised retail shops, 12.7 per cent for non-specialised wholesale of food, and 8.7 per cent for wholesale of pharmaceutical products.
Most direct foreign investments came from Austria (28.9 per cent), Germany (22.5 per cent), Italy (10.8 per cent) and Luxembourg (10.1 per cent). Austria and Germany have been the leading investors in Croatia over the past ten and a half years.
Of the total of USD10.1 billion in direct foreign investments in Croatia since 1993, 25.7 per cent have come from Austria, 20.7 per cent from Germany, 14.7 per cent from the United States, 6 per cent from Hungary, 5.8 per cent from Luxembourg, and 5.7 per cent from Italy. Those were mostly owner investments, totalling USD6.4 billion, made during the privatisation period.
Most of the direct owner investments were made in the telecommunications sector (20.9 per cent), the banking sector (19.6 per cent), the pharmaceutical industry (11.3 per cent), petroleum production (7.8 per cent), cement production (3.3 per cent), hotels and motels (3 per cent), and trade (about 3 per cent).
In the first half of 2004, Croatian companies invested USD62.5 million abroad, nearly half of that amount (49.2 per cent) in Serbia and Montenegro.
Over the last ten and a half years, Croatian companies have invested USD1.2 billion, of which 32.3 per cent in Switzerland, 16.5 per cent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 12.8 per cent in Poland, and 9.9 per cent in Serbia and Montenegro. Most of the investments abroad (USD1.1 billion) accounted for owner investments, and 56 per cent of owner investments accounted for the pharmaceutical industry.