USMTO and CTMR, June 2022: The US Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) programme tracks orders in the US market, based on the reports from participants. Although orders in June 2022 were down both the previous month and a year ago, for the 1st half of the year there is an increase of +13.1% compared to the same period in 2021 (January to June).
It is worth noting that 2021 was the best year on record, so this is still a strong position despite the modest dip in the past couple of months. With IMTS taking place in September, demand is expected to pick up later in the year. For June, in noting that the value was higher than average for the month while the number of units is lower, AMT suggest that this is down to a combination of inflation and more automation being included in machine tool sales.
By region, using the data for metal cutting machines (these account for more than 98% of orders tracked by the survey in the first half of 2022), there was only a little growth in the North-East (+2%) and North-Central-West (+5%) areas and an improvement of +12% in the North-Central-East when comparing the first half of 2022 with the same months in 2021. However, the other three regions all had strong growth led by South-Central (+36%) and South-East (+35%), with the West (+21%) also performing well.
The US Cutting Tool Market Report (CTMR) tracks orders for tooling on a similar basis. For the 1st half of this year, business is +7.9% ahead of the same period last year and the rolling 12-month trend is up by +11.5%. However, unlike the machine tool side of the business, the tooling market has not yet got back to its previous peak annual rate from May 2019 or even to its pre-pandemic levels. Despite some easing, output activity is still being limited by shortages of materials, especially in this case, some metals.
You might also like to note that AMT have published a summary of the trends for work-holding equipment for the first half of the year. Orders for work-holding technology stood at $162.7 million for H1-2022 ($21 million of this was for export); these are the strongest figures for both US and export markets since theH2-2019. You can find this report at https://www.amtonline.org/article/first-half-of-2022-saw-best-workholding-orders-since-2019.
You can download the press releases for the two surveys from the AMT web-site at www.amtonline.org/topic/intelligence, with the CTMR release also published on the USCTI web-site at www.uscti.com; alternatively, you can request either or both releases from MTA and we can make sure you get them when they are published each month.
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European Industrial Production, June 2022: Data from Eurostat showed that, compared to May 2022, total industrial production increased by +0.6% for the EU and by +0.7% in the Euro-zone. Looking back to June 2021, output is up by +3.2% and +2.4% respectively. The longer term trend shows how the sub-set of the Euro-zone has been growing more slowly than the whole of the EU since the middle of 2020 and although they seem to have settled back into similar growth rates, this is not really closing that gap.
For the sub-sectors of industrial production, there is some encouragement in that capital goods – the most important sub-sector for suppliers of manufacturing technology – had the strongest growth rate on all 4 comparisons. Month-on-month growth for this sub-sector in the EU was +2.1% and for the Euro-zone it was +2.6%, while compared to a year ago, the growth rates were +7.5% and +7.6% respectively. Indeed, output for consumer goods (both durables and non-durables) fell compared to May, with intermediate goods also seeing output slip slightly.
By country and focusing on the change compared to June 2021, of the 26 Member States who have published the June 2022 figures (Cyprus is the odd one out), 19 reported that total industrial output was higher than a year earlier, six reported a fall and Germany was unchanged. The fastest growth was in Ireland (+25.4%), Denmark (+25.0%) and Bulgaria (+17.4%) with the largest falls being registered in Belgium (-11.6%), Slovakia (-5.7%) and Romania (-3.7%) – this group also included Italy (-1.2%).
It is worth noting that industrial production is dominated by manufacturing but it also includes output of the extraction industries (mining & quarrying) and utilities (supply of electricity, gas & water).
You can download the euro-indicators bulletin from the Eurostat website at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/news/euro-indicators (12 August) or request it from MTA.
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European GDP, 2nd Quarter 2022: Eurostat has also published estimates of GDP growth for the 2nd quarter of the year; these show growth of +0.6% for both the EU and the Euro-zone. This is the same pace of growth as in the 1st quarter for the EU and marginally faster for the Euro-zone.
Compared to a year ago, the EU economy has grown by +4.0% with the sub-set of the Euro-zone fractionally slower at +3.9%. Eurostat notes that, by contrast, the US economy contracted by -0.2% in the 2nd quarter, although it was +1.6% larger than a year earlier.
At the country level, 21 of the EU Member States have published their data for the 2nd quarter and all but 5 of them saw a quarter-on-quarter increase in GDP; Poland (-2.3%), Latvia (-1.4%), Lithuania (-0.4%) and Portugal (-0.2%) saw a contraction in their economy and Germany was unchanged from the level of the 1st quarter. As all of these economies grew in the previous quarter, no-one yet has a recession.
The fastest quarter-on-quarter growth rates were in the Netherlands (+2.6%), Romania (+2.1%) and Sweden (+1.4%) but all three of these are on different paths; for the Netherlands this represents an acceleration of growth, for Romania, it is a slower pace of growth than in the 1st quarter and for Sweden, it is a reversal of the fall in GDP at the start of this year.
All of the countries that have published data for the 2nd quarter were larger than a year earlier; to some extent this is still reflecting the recovery from the pandemic and, in particular, the 3rd wave of infections early in 2021. There are some timing issues which mean that some countries began this phase of the recovery in the 2nd quarter of last year while for others it only got underway in Q3 (or even Q4 in a couple of cases) and this affects the strength of growth over the past year.
You can download the euro-indicators bulletin from the Eurostat website at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/news/euro-indicators (17 August) or request it from MTA.