Foreign investment fell 23% — and a quarter of what arrived went into property

Foreign direct investment into Georgia was $468.8 million in the second quarter of 2026, a fall of 23.2% against adjusted second-quarter 2025 data of $610.6 million. Geostat names the cause directly: a decline in reinvestment. Reinvested earnings still made up the largest single component at $300.5 million, or 64.1% of the total, with equity at $210.5 million and debt instruments — trade credits and loans — at negative $42.2 million. The first quarter of 2026 was $281.3 million, so the quarterly path this year has been uneven rather than simply downward.

China was the largest single source of foreign direct investment in the quarter at $219.5 million, or 46.8% of the total — ahead of the United Kingdom at $123.5 million (26.3%) and the United Arab Emirates at $47.7 million (10.2%). Those three together account for 83.3%. Behind them sit Malta at $47.3 million, Türkiye at $29.8 million, Israel at $25.6 million, Azerbaijan at $24.3 million, Germany at $20.7 million, Russia at $17.6 million and Japan at $13.3 million. A concentration this tight is worth noticing in both directions: it means a single large transaction can move the national total, and it means the quarterly number is a poor proxy for broad investor sentiment.

Financial and insurance activities took the largest share at $207.6 million, or 44.3%. Real estate activities came second at $119.9 million, 25.6%, with manufacturing third at $59.0 million, 12.6% — the three together 82.4% of the total. Construction, which is counted separately from real estate activities, took $34.4 million, or 7.3%. For anyone watching Georgian property from abroad, the useful figure is that $154.3 million flowed into real estate and construction combined in a single quarter, roughly a third of all foreign direct investment, even in a quarter when the headline total fell by nearly a quarter.

Less than the headline suggests, for three reasons. The data are preliminary and marked as such; Geostat's own revision note says adjusted figures arrive in August 2027 and may change the series. The fall is attributed to reinvestment, which is to say to decisions by companies already operating in Georgia about what to do with profits earned here, not to new investors staying away. And one line in the country table — other countries at negative $100.4 million — shows how much divestment and intra-group movement can distort a single quarter. A property investor would do better to read the sector line, $119.9 million into real estate, than the headline fall.