Foreign companies owned €24bn worth of Slovenian business at the end of 2025, according to figures Banka Slovenije published in June. That was 4 per cent more than a year earlier and almost half as much again as in 2019, when the stock stood at €16.2bn. Most of last year's increase came from owners putting fresh equity into their Slovenian subsidiaries, €0.8bn of it, and from €0.4bn in profits they chose to leave in the country rather than take home. They took plenty home as well, since profit distributions to foreign owners rose by 7 per cent to €1.6bn.

Who owns it has changed little. Austria is still the largest investor by a distance, with 20.9 per cent of the total, followed by Luxembourg, better known as a home for holding companies than for factories, and by Switzerland, whose share rose from 12 to 14.3 per cent in a single year. Germany, Croatia and Italy come next. The central bank counts the direct investor rather than the ultimate owner, so money routed through a holding company in Luxembourg is recorded as Luxembourgish wherever its owner is based. More than two-thirds of the money sits in manufacturing, which took a larger share again last year, wholesale and retail trade, and telecoms and information services.

That is the stock, and it records decisions taken years ago. The present looks livelier. Slovenia's economy grew by 5 per cent year on year in the second quarter, the fastest rate in the EU, with investment rising by more than 12 per cent. Some of that is public money from the EU's pandemic recovery fund, which has paid Slovenia €1.81bn so far and to which the government sent its final claim, for €272m, at the end of September. Once that is spent, more of the work falls to private capital, foreign capital included.

SPIRIT Slovenia Business Development Agency, the public body that courts foreign investors, sees a different mix in what is coming through its door now. The strongest interest this year, it said, has come from Asia, Germany and Austria, and the two groups want different things from the country. "For Asian investors, Slovenia's strategic location is a key advantage, offering an attractive base for their European operations and manufacturing activities," the agency said. The case is easier to make while passage through the Red Sea and the Gulf stays restricted and dear to insure, since a factory inside the single market depends on neither. Investors from the German-speaking countries, under growing pressure to cut costs, are looking for somewhere cheaper to operate than home that does not mean settling for lower quality.

No Asian country yet appears among the largest investors in the central bank's figures, though Asian companies are hardly new arrivals. Hisense, the Chinese appliance maker, bought Gorenje, Slovenia's best-known manufacturer, in 2018 through a subsidiary registered in Luxembourg, and Japan's Yaskawa builds industrial robots in Kočevje, in the south of the country, at what was its first robot factory in Europe.

What surprises them

Those who do come, the agency said, are often pleasantly surprised by how developed and well organised the country is and by the quality of life, and they value a workforce that is well educated and widely speaks foreign languages, which makes setting up a local operation a good deal easier. Its own work begins before any of that, while investors are still weighing Slovenia against locations in other countries, and runs through finding sites, accompanying visits and introductions to institutions and local partners, all the way to guidance on permits and paperwork.

"For Asian investors, Slovenia's strategic location is a key advantage."

SPIRIT Slovenia Business Development Agency

The money flows the other way too. Slovenian companies held €11.9bn in businesses abroad at the end of last year, 11.9 per cent more than a year before, and two-thirds of it is in four other countries of the former Yugoslavia. Croatia alone accounts for more than a third, with Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia behind it. Slovenia takes in Austrian and Swiss capital at one end and sends its own south at the other, which leaves it well placed to explain the region to whoever asks next.