How to buy América Móvil and Cemex from India — the practical playbook

Most Indian investors who get curious about Mexico assume the hard part is opening an account on the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, getting a Mexican tax ID, and learning to trade in pesos. It is not. The four largest, most internationally relevant Mexican companies — América Móvil, Cemex, Coca-Cola FEMSA and Grupo Televisa — all trade as American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on the New York Stock Exchange, in US dollars, through the same brokers you would use to buy Apple.

That single fact reshapes the whole exercise. You do not need an RFC (the Mexican tax identification number), you do not need a local casa de bolsa, and you do not need to wrestle with peso settlement. You need an LRS-funded global brokerage account and an understanding of how the layers of tax stack up. This guide walks the practical playbook end to end, then is honest about where the friction actually sits — which is almost never the buying, and almost always the reporting.

Why Mexico, and why these names

Mexico is the textbook "nearshoring" trade. As manufacturers shorten supply chains and move production closer to the US market, Mexico has become the obvious beneficiary — it shares a long border with the world's largest consumer economy, has a free-trade framework with the US and Canada, and offers manufacturing wages well below China's. Foreign direct investment has been running at record levels. For an Indian investor already building global exposure, Mexico is a way to add a structurally cheap, US-adjacent emerging market that is not just another bet on US mega-cap tech.

The companies most investors reach for are concentrated and recognisable:

Company	ADR ticker	What it does
América Móvil	AMX	Latin America's largest telecom — mobile, broadband, pay-TV across the region
Cemex	CX	One of the world's biggest building-materials and cement producers
Coca-Cola FEMSA	KOF	The largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world by volume
Grupo Televisa	TV	Spanish-language media and content, plus a large cable business

Behind these sit FEMSA itself (the beverage-and-retail conglomerate that owns the OXXO convenience-store chain) and Walmart de México, "Walmex," which dominate the consumer-and-retail story but are less commonly held as ADRs by retail investors. The local market index to know is the S&P/BMV IPC, Mexico's benchmark, and the regulator overseeing all of this is the CNBV (Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores).

The ADR route, step by step

This is the path the overwhelming majority of Indian residents should use, because it requires nothing Mexico-specific.

Step 1 — Open an LRS-funded global brokerage account

You need a brokerage account that can trade US-listed securities. The common choices for Indian residents are Interactive Brokers, Saxo Bank, and the various India-facing platforms that resell access to US markets. You fund it by remitting money abroad under the RBI's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), which allows up to USD 250,000 per financial year per individual. Our LRS explainer covers the mechanics and the paperwork your bank will ask for.

Step 2 — Budget for the 20% TCS on the remittance

This is the cost most people forget. On foreign remittances under LRS, banks collect Tax Collected at Source (TCS) at 20% on the amount above Rs 10 lakh in a financial year (a lower rate and threshold apply to education and medical remittances, which do not concern investment). TCS is not a tax you lose — it is a prepayment you reclaim as a credit against your income-tax liability when you file your return — but it is real cash out the door at the time you remit. Model it before you transfer, ideally with our LRS and TCS calculator, so the size of your first remittance is not a surprise.

Step 3 — Buy the ADR exactly like a US stock

Once funded, you search the ticker — AMX, CX, KOF or TV — and place the order in US dollars. There is no currency conversion to pesos, no Mexican settlement cycle, and no local custodian for you to deal with. An ADR is a US-listed certificate representing shares held abroad by a depositary bank; for the purposes of buying and selling, it behaves like any NYSE-listed stock. This is the entire reason the ADR route is so much simpler than direct BMV access.

Step 4 — Understand the dividend that arrives

When América Móvil or Coca-Cola FEMSA pays a dividend, Mexico applies withholding tax before the money reaches you. We cover the full mechanics in the companion guide on Mexico dividend and capital-gains tax for Indians, but the short version is that Mexico levies an additional withholding on dividends paid to foreign residents, and the India-Mexico tax treaty caps that rate. You then declare the gross dividend in India and claim a foreign tax credit for the Mexican tax withheld.

The direct-BMV route, and why you probably should not bother

You can buy ordinary Mexican shares listed on the BMV directly, and a global broker like Interactive Brokers can route you there. But the friction is real:

• You need an RFC, the Mexican tax ID, for proper direct local access and to get treaty treatment cleanly on local-market gains.
• You settle and hold in pesos, adding a currency-conversion layer on every trade and a peso cash balance to manage.
• Local-market liquidity outside the index heavyweights can be thin for a foreign retail investor.
• The capital-gains position is messier for non-residents on local-market sales, as the next section explains.

For the four names above plus a handful of others, the ADR gives you the same economic exposure with none of this. The direct route only starts to make sense if you want a Mexican stock that has no ADR, or you want the local ETF NAFTRAC, and even then most investors are better served by the US-listed EWW ETF for broad index exposure.

How the tax actually stacks up

This is where Mexico investing demands more attention than buying a US index fund, because three layers interact. Here is the shape of it; the dedicated tax guide goes deeper.

Event	What happens in Mexico	What happens in India
Dividend received	Withholding tax on the gross dividend, capped by the India-Mexico treaty	Declare gross dividend as income, taxed at slab; claim foreign tax credit for the Mexican tax
Sale of a listed share	A definitive tax on net gains for residents at 10%; treaty residents who file the right affidavit may be exempt on local-market gains	Capital gains taxed in India regardless
Holding the asset	Nothing	Schedule FA disclosure mandatory every year

The single most important nuance for non-residents: the headline "10% on net gains from listed shares" is the rate that applies cleanly to Mexican residents. A non-resident selling local-market Mexican shares can face withholding of up to 25% of gross proceeds or 35% of the net gain unless they are protected by a tax treaty and provide the broker with the required residency documentation (an affidavit). For an Indian resident going through the ADR route, this local-market mechanic largely falls away — but it is exactly why the ADR route is cleaner, and why anyone going direct needs to get their treaty paperwork right before they sell.

On the India side, gains on these foreign shares are taxed under Section 112 (note: not 112A, which is for Indian listed equity). If you hold for more than 24 months, the gain is long-term and taxed at 12.5% without indexation; if you sell sooner, it is short-term and taxed at your slab rate. Our how US stocks are taxed in India post explains the same framework, which applies identically to Mexican ADRs because they are foreign securities.

The reporting you cannot skip

The buying is easy; the compliance is where Indian investors get tripped up. Two obligations are non-negotiable.

Schedule FA

Every foreign asset you hold — including every Mexican ADR — must be disclosed in Schedule FA of your Indian income-tax return, each year you hold it. This is not optional and is not triggered by a sale; merely holding the asset at any point in the relevant period creates the disclosure duty, and the penalties for omission under the black-money law are severe. Our Schedule FA helper walks through the initial-, peak- and closing-value figures the form wants.

Foreign tax credit and Form 67

To avoid being taxed twice on your Mexican dividends — once via Mexican withholding, again as income in India — you claim a foreign tax credit by filing Form 67 before your return. Form 67 is being renumbered (to Form 44 from the 2026-27 tax year), but the function is unchanged. The companion guide Form 67 and the foreign tax credit and our Form 67 FTC calculator cover the process; the India-US dividend withholding and Form 67 walkthrough shows the same mechanics in a US context.

Where Mexico fits in a portfolio

Mexico is a satellite, not a core. For most Indian investors building global exposure, the sensible frame is a US-heavy core with emerging-market and Latin American satellites around it. Mexico sits naturally alongside Brazil as the other large, liquid Latin American equity market accessible from India, and the two are often considered together in any regional allocation. If you want one-ticket diversified exposure to all of this rather than four concentrated single names, the broad-market option is covered in our EWW ETF guide, and the wider set of country playbooks lives on the markets hub and the Mexico country page.

The honest summary: buying América Móvil or Cemex from India is genuinely easy through the ADR route — easier than most people expect. The work is in the tax stacking and the annual reporting, not the trade. Get the LRS funding, TCS budgeting, treaty paperwork and Schedule FA disclosure right, and the concentrated single-name Mexico exposure is yours with a few clicks.

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This is general information, not tax or investment advice. Cross-border tax for non-residents holding Mexican securities is genuinely specialist, and treaty treatment depends on your documentation. Figures and rules reflect the position as understood in mid-2026 and can change. Consult a qualified cross-border tax advisor before acting.