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Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Hungary PMI September 2007

The Hungary manufacturing PMI jumped in September. While manufacturing activity across the euro zone has been dropping steadily to a near two-year low in September, Hungary's seasonally adjusted Purchasing Manager Index (PMI) jumped by 3.6 points to 54.2 points, a five-month high, according to the Hungarian Association of Logistics, Purchasing and Inventory Management (HALPIM) earlier this week.

On the other hand, the Ecostat Top-100 index, a monthly measure of confidence at Hungary's largest hundred companies dropped to a five-month low of 95.8% in September from 103.4% in August. It was however well above its 74.8% level of a year earlier.

The September PMI was slightly up from the 53.4 registered in Sept 2006 and over the 52.3 average for the same month for the previous three years.


The majority of sub-indices gave higher readings than in August, especially the new order volume (up 5.3 pts to 58.2), production output (+4.5 to 54.5) and employment (+3.7 to 53.1) ones.

The index of inventories, however, jumped 7.2 pts to 58.4.

Oh well, good news is always good news, even if we are not really sure what happens next here.

1 comment:

Antal Dániel said...

Maybe the PMI was a good forecast for the good industrial output data I wonder what the high inventory levels mean. I can imagine there was a bit of shortage in transport capacity given that due to the dry weather conditions all over Europe the EU grain inventories were sold in late summer and transported to all over the Union. I do not know how it appears in the trade balance though because this grain was the property of the EU for a year, and they paid for it the year before.