Industrial production slowed to 4.1% YoY in April, down from 5.7% in March. This also came in much lower than market expectations, registering a 33-month low.<\/p>\n
The softness of industrial production was surprising, given the strong export data that we have been seeing in recent months. A look at the subcategories suggests that this export-driven momentum is still supporting the data, with auto (9.2%), rail, ships, and aeroplanes (8.2%), and computer, communication, and other electronic equipment manufacturing (15.6%) all well outperforming headline growth. Hi-tech manufacturing (12.8%) continues to fare well, with solid growth in both industrial (15.1%) and service robot (12.3%) production. <\/p>\n
However, sluggish domestic activity is dragging many other categories. Real estate-related categories, such as cement (-10.8%), glass (-7.9%), and steel (-1.7%), were clear underperformers. We may also be seeing the impact of anti-involution policies, as solar cells declined -25.6% YoY in April amid a broader crackdown on overcapacity and excessive price competition. <\/p>\n
The impact of the Iran War is also appearing in the data. Crude oil processing volume fell -5.8% YoY on the month. Electricity, heat, gas, and water production and supply bucked the broader trend, accelerating to 5.3% YoY in April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Industrial production slowed to 4.1% YoY in April, down from 5.7% in March. This also came in much…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-590457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}