Mexico’s Late-2025 Slowdown Returns, Testing The Government’s Growth Promise
Key Points
- INEGI’s fast IOAE nowcast suggests Mexico’s economy slipped 0.2% in November after a stronger October.
- Industry is the weak link, while services are only just keeping the overall picture from worsening.
- Private forecasts cluster near 0.4% growth for 2025, below the government’s target range.
Mexico is ending 2025 with a stop-start economy, and the latest early signal suggests the stop sign is back.
INEGI’s Indicador Oportuno de la Actividad Económica, or IOAE, is a rapid estimate meant to anticipate the monthly activity index known as the IGAE weeks before the final figure is published.
For November 2025, the IOAE points to a 0.2% month-to-month contraction and zero growth versus November 2024. In plain terms, the economy likely got slightly smaller than in October and was not meaningfully larger than a year earlier.
The twist is that October now looks better than first thought. INEGI revised October to a 0.5% monthly expansion and a 0.5% annual increase. That revision is a reminder of how this early read works: it is useful, but it can change as more hard data arrives.
The deeper story is where the weakness sits. INEGI’s breakdown suggests industry, or secondary activities, fell 0.3% on the month and 1.5% on the year in November.
Services, or tertiary activities, dipped 0.1% on the month but rose 0.8% year on year. Services are still growing compared with last year, but they are no longer strong enough to offset a soft industrial base.
Mexico’s Slowdown Is Becoming a Pattern
This pattern is not a one-off. The year has already logged several estimated monthly declines: March (-0.2%), May (-0.1%), July (-0.4%), September (-0.6%), and now November (-0.2%). September’s official IGAE drop of 0.6% underlined that the slowdown has real momentum.
Banco Base economist Gabriela Siller says the trajectory implies roughly 0.44% GDP growth in 2025, close to the 0.4% median in Citi’s expectations survey and below the federal government’s 0.5% to 1.5% range.
Citi’s survey also points to 1.2% in 2026, more rebound than boom. Why should readers abroad care? Mexico is a core manufacturing platform and a key link in North American supply chains.
When Mexican industry weakens and growth flattens, it ripples through investment plans, cross-border trade volumes, and corporate earnings from autos to electronics, at a moment when companies want predictability.
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