Industrial production is still accelerating: growth for the first three months of the year has soared to 21%. Not only are existing capacities better utilized, but there are also new export capacities. Business reports industry-wide talk of a widening boom. Electric machine and instrument manufacturers had the largest production and export sales growths, and what’s more, have experienced a significant rise in domestic sales. Compared to last year’s low base figure, the goods seeing the fastest export growth are durable consumer products and goods for further processing.
While a year ago the production levels of ten processing industry branches were deteriorating, this year only mineral oil processing has decreased. The textile industry has continued to grow. The production of building materials and food products has gone up about 10%, while mining decreased and energy sector production grew only a few percentage points. This latter is explained by the fact that while domestic energy consumption was down 3.4% in January compared to the year before, from February on it dropped to 5-6% less than twelve months earlier.
Construction companies increased their production during the first quarter – partly due to a low base figure, but also clearly because of a rise in the volume of new contracts. Building-mechanical engineering boasted the largest growth with more than 20%. Although during the first three months of the year more buildings were completed than a year before, during the second half of the quarter the volume of contracts was 10-15% lower than the base figure.
