Austria | The investment control “powerhouse"

On 25 July 2020, the Austrian Investment Control Act (Investitionskontrollgesetz – ICA) entered into force and started a new era of foreign direct investment (FDI) screening in Austria.

This report aims at providing some key data around the operation of FDI screening in our country. In this exercise, we refrain from recycling the information collected by the European Commission and published in their three annual reports on the screening of foreign direct investments in the Union. We just wanted to stress again what the European Commission concluded in its latest annual report for the year 2022: Six Member States are responsible for the vast majority of notifications to the EU cooperation mechanism.

• 4 of them are large Member States (France, Germany, Italy and Spain),
• the remaining 2 (Denmark and Austria) are certainly smaller, but “grand” in FDI terms.

The first and (for the moment) only Activity Report on Investment Control of the Austrian FDI authority is already historic, covering the first 12 months of the new FDI screening regime in Austria. But thanks to a parliamentary question and a responsive Federal Minister of Labour and Economy, we now have a highly topical dataset for the period 25 July 2020 – 30 November 2023.

Key FDI Data