The investor you already have: aftercare is the cheapest FDI strategy nobody funds

When CINDE presented its 2025 results, the figure worth dwelling on was not the marquee total of 67 supported projects. It was the split: 48 of them were reinvestments by multinationals already operating in Costa Rica, against 19 genuinely new arrivals. The year before, the same ratio held — 52 of 73 projects were existing investors growing. Roughly seven in ten of the projects a celebrated investment agency lands each year come from companies it won, in some cases, a decade ago. The ribbon-cutting is the smallest part of the job.

Costa Rica is not the outlier here; it is the agency disciplined enough to publish the number. UNCTAD has documented the same shape across mature economies for years: more than half of FDI, and sometimes over two-thirds, comes from firms already present rather than fresh entrants. The implication for an investment officer is uncomfortable, because it inverts how the function is resourced. The marketing budget, the trade missions, the glossy site brochure — almost all of it is aimed at the 19, while the 48 are managed by whoever has time.

There is a reason the reinvestment number rarely reaches a minister's podium. As Alexandre de Crombrugghe, who runs the OECD's network of investment promotion agencies, has shown survey after survey, the aftercare function — the unit that retains and advises existing investors — consistently draws the least money and the fewest staff in the building. A minister will stand beside a new factory for the cameras; the investor who quietly weighed leaving and chose to stay never produces a photograph. So agencies know what their investors promised on paper and what they filed eight months ago, and almost nothing about what they are doing now.

The agencies that close that gap, the ranking outfit Reinvantage argues, share one habit: they are nosy. They run an investor relationship like an intelligence file. They track which executive was promoted last month and which supplier is being paid late, whose hiring has stalled, what a chief executive said about the country on the last earnings call and in what tone. They match those public traces against what the investor said across the table, and they broker an introduction or unblock a permit before a cooling recruitment turns into a relocation. By the time a departure reaches the press, the decision was usually taken months earlier — when nobody at the agency was watching.

None of this is expensive, which is the part practitioners most often get wrong. The tooling is an off-the-shelf customer-relationship system and some signal-monitoring software; the binding constraint is almost never budget. It is whether one arm of the state will share what it holds with another. Estonia's X-Road data exchange lets a tax office, a statistics bureau and a registry pass signals to an aftercare team as a matter of routine; where that plumbing is missing, the agency is reduced to guessing. The work is unglamorous: find out who holds the data you need on your existing investors, then build the pipes so it reaches you on a schedule rather than after the fact.

For agencies outside the wealthy core — across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia — the stakes are higher, not lower. When headline inflows are thin and every anchor tenant carries an outsized share of the jobs, losing one is a regional event, and winning its next expansion can outweigh a year of cold outreach. It also travels straight to the membership question Doyen members keep circling: agencies are judged on the investors they attract, but they are remembered for the ones they kept. The cheapest growth most agencies have is sitting in a building they already toured.