Industry sales in Q2 down 4.7% YoY after Q1 increase

Industry sales in Portugal in the second quarter was down 4.7% on the same period a year earlier, after having in the first quarter increased by 6.5% on the year, the National Statistics Institute (INE) announced on Wednesday.

In June alone, sales in industry showed a nominal year-on-year drop of 7.8%, when in the previous month the drop was just 1.7%, INE noted, stressing that if the energy category is excluded, turnover in June was down 1.5% on the year, after growth of 0.7% in May.

In addition, the release explains that the sales index for the domestic market in June was down 5.8% on the year, against a fall of 1.4% in the previous monath, thus contributing 3.3 percentage points less to the fall in the total index.

Sales to foreign markets, in turn, were in June down 10.2% on the year (following a drop of 2% in May), resulting in a contribution of minus 4.5 percentage points to the aggregate index (-0.9 percentage points in the previous month).

By categories, energy made the weightiest contribution to the fall of the total index, with minus 6.6 percentage points, resulting from the 27% decrease in June (-2.2 pp and -9.9% in the previous month, while intermediate goods accentuated the year-on-year decrease by 0.2 pp, to a 9.6% drop, having contributed with -3.4 pp (-3.5 pp in May).

On the other hand, consumer goods and investment goods decelerated by 0.7 p.p. and 11.9 p.p., respectively, to a growth of 7.6% and 2.2% in June, contributing together with 2.2 p.p. (4.1 p.p. in the previous month).

In monthly terms, the turnover index in industry fell by 5.7% in June, against a rise of 0.5% in the same month of 2022.

The employment and wage indices, in turn, registered year-on-year increases of 0.9% and 8.3% (0.8% and 8.6% in the previous month), respectively, while the hours worked index went from a growth of 1.2% in May to a fall of 0.5% in June this year.