Industrial production falls 6.0% in February

Ukraine’s industrial production declined 6.0% yoy in February, UkrStat reported on March 18. Core industries continued shrinking quite fast on the back of poor external demand: chemicals (-22.1%), machinery (-11.4%) and metallurgy (-6.6% yoy). Relatively warm weather caused energy production to shrink 17.2% yoy throughout the month. Food production growth slowed to 3.0% yoy from 9.5% yoy in January. At the same time, mining accelerated (up 0.9% yoy from -1.9% yoy) owing to faster iron ore (+4.3% yoy) and coal (+1.4% yoy) extraction.

Alexander Paraschiy: The February industry figures confirmed our vision of Ukraine’s economic situation, in which industry is losing in competition with producers from other countries. That is why the economy hasn’t benefitted from some improvement in global resource markets. The stronger world economic growth might help domestic exporters, but Ukrainian industry will keep stagnating when such growth is very modest and leading economies are struggling to employ excessive production capacity.  Against this background, we lower our industrial output estimate to 0.6% yoy in 2013 and even this result is possible only with a markets revival in 2H13.