Mexico City, Feb 24 (IANS/EFE): Mexico received a record $35 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) last year, officials said.

FDI was up 180 percent last year, compared to 2012, when it totaled "slightly more than $13 billion", President Enrique Peña Nieto said during the inauguration of the Honda plant in Celaya, a city in the central state of Guanajuato, earlier this weekend.

Foreign investment, combined with the structural reforms approved in 2013, will allow Mexico to have a "better performance" economically this year, the president said.

"In 2013, we were below expectations with gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 1.1 percent, but 2014 promises to be a year of better economic growth," thanks to the effects of the reforms and the flow of investment into the country, Peña Nieto said at the plant's inauguration Friday.

Mexico's economy grew by just 0.70 percent in real terms in the fourth quarter of 2013, compared to the same period a year earlier, and by just half the rate in the third quarter.

The economic numbers appeared to cast doubt on the projections made by the Finance Secretariat, which estimated in January that GDP had recovered in the last three months of 2013, a trend that did not materialize.