Which way is Brazil headed?

It looked up, after Foxconn decided to invest — how much is the subject of much speculation, as one report pegs it at about $500 million, another at as much as $12 billion — in new manufacturing campuses in São Paulo and elsewhere.

But Multek recently bailed, leaving the country without its largest bare board fabricator, and now Benchmark is leaving too, citing customers that were “challenged by some of the regulation challenges there.”

Brazil has eased some of its notoriously rigid (and expense) laws that taxed imports, rules designed at essentially forcing companies to build their supply chains inside the nation. It’s a tremendous potential market, with nearly 200 million residents. A few companies leaving isn’t necessarily a trend. But the flow always starts with a trickle.