The 266% that isn't the story

Medellin closed 2025 with $402 million in national and foreign investment and 11,211 jobs attached to it, a 266% jump on 2024, according to ACI Medellin, the metro area's investment and cooperation agency. It is the kind of figure that travels — the sort a competing city's promotion team screenshots and drops into a board deck under the heading 'what good looks like.' Before anyone does that, they should ask the question a daily reader of investment numbers learns to ask first: 266% above what? In 2024 the city booked just $150 million and 1,759 jobs, a trough dug by national political uncertainty and an interest-rate environment that pushed capital decisions across Latin America into the following year. A record measured against your worst year is real, but it is not the same as a step-change in underlying performance — and it is not the number to hand a colleague as a target.

The durable figure sits one paragraph down and never makes the headline. Since 2008, ACI Medellin has managed roughly $4.08 billion in foreign direct investment and about 44,000 jobs across the Aburra Valley, on the order of 347 projects through 2023 plus the surge since. Set 2025 against that seventeen-year record and it reads honestly: an above-trend year — the long-run average is closer to $220 million — rather than a city that quadrupled its capability overnight. That cumulative track record, not any single vintage, is what an institutional investor is actually pricing when it commits to a first-year landing. The lesson for a promotion officer is unglamorous but exact: your credibility compounds over decades and is destroyed in a headline that overpromises.

What produced the track record is a division of labour most cities never build. ACI does the outward-facing work — promoting the city abroad, building investor cases, handling tax and legal guidance, running landing agendas for the delegations that now arrive most weeks. Ruta N, the innovation agency created in 2009 by the mayor's office and the utility EPM, does the connective tissue: linking arriving firms to universities, recruiters, training providers and the dense mesh of local tech communities so a multinational finds talent and suppliers already in place rather than importing everything. It is why the World Economic Forum sited its Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution — focused on AI and govtech — in Medellin, and why Antioquia now accounts for something like 41% of Colombia's startup-ecosystem growth. A landing sticks because there is a local economy to plug into, not just a tax line.

But the mechanism investors name most often isn't an agency at all — it's a standing table. The CEOs of the region's largest companies, the mayor and the universities have sat down together, monthly, for years, to argue about how to grow the city. That habit is the actual product. It is what lets an investor believe a commitment will outlast the administration that signed it, in a country where the presidency changed hands at the end of May and where Medellin's Special District tax framework will have to survive whatever comes next. Continuity you can point to is worth more than an incentive you have to explain, because the incentive can be repealed by the next council and the continuity, demonstrably, has not been.

None of which makes the city frictionless, and the honest version of the pitch says so. English proficiency is a real constraint — Colombia ranks 74th of 116 on the EF index, and Medellin, though above the national mark, still trails its regional rivals — so client-facing operations arrive expecting to fund bootcamps and layer in bilingual staff under a hire-then-train model. Success has its own bill: digital nomads and foreign firms have pushed rents up in the fashionable neighbourhoods, wages are climbing in the hottest skill sets, and the new deep-water Puerto Antioquia is a wildcard whose payoff isn't yet booked. A promotion agency that hides these loses the second meeting; one that names them, and shows the fix, wins the trust that the whole model runs on.

So the thing worth copying from Medellin is not the 266% and not the incentive schedule. It is the architecture: an outward-facing promotion agency paired with an ecosystem connector, both sitting under a cross-sector convening that makes commitments credible across election cycles, all measured over decades rather than quarters. That is harder to build than a tax holiday and far harder for a rival to replicate — which is precisely why it is the more valuable asset. The number to put in the board deck isn't this year's growth rate. It's the seventeen-year line underneath it.