Industrial production and retail trade sales gave further signs of a slowdown in the economyAccording to the data to November presented yesterday by the Dane.
Retail trade sales increased 1.7 percent in the eleventh month of the year, which contrasts with the increase of 11.8 percent in the whole of the 11 consecutive months.
Meanwhile, industrial production grew in that month 4.5 percent below the 11.8 percent that it had grown in the accumulated once months.
By December, according to Fenalco’s Monthly Log, businessmen reduced their profits or lost money.
71 percent of those surveyed saw their sales decrease or increase in similar behavior to last year.
«If inflation is taken into account, of course, this means a decrease,» explained the union’s president, Jaime Alberto Cabal.
The monthly survey reveals that, in December, 29 percent of merchants increased their sales volumes compared to the same month in 2021, 42 percent sold similar amounts, and 29 percent reported a decrease.
52 percent of the businessmen consulted reduced their profits or lost money.
«The country’s merchants had to sacrifice margins to be able, somehow, to exceed the year and not cause a greater inflationary impact by transferring prices to the consumer,» said Cabal.
According to the economic research center of Banco de Bogotá, the slowdown is accentuated at the end of 2022.
«The industry and commerce sectors are the most representative in the post-pandemic recovery and have accentuated the slowdown,» he states.
It also points out that the indicators of expectations have surely fallen in recent months, which accentuates uncertainty about economic growth in 2023.
About the industry, to November, Dane reported that real sales increased 3.8 percent and employed personnel increased 2.7 percent.
«Of the 39 industrial activities represented by the survey, a total of 24 registered positive variations in their real production, adding 6.7 percentage points to the total annual variation, and 15 subsectors with negative variations subtracted a total of 2.2 percentage points from the total variation”, says the Dane.
For its part, during the last twelve months until November 2022real production increased 11.9 percent, while real sales increased 11.2 percent and employed personnel grew 4.5 percent.
In trade sales, employed personnel grew 4.0 percent compared to the same month last year.
Without including fuel trade, the variation in real sales in the sector was 1.6 percent, says Dane.
«If the results of November 2022 are compared with those of November 2019, there is evidence of a 13.5 percent increase in retail sales and a 1.2 percent drop in relation to employed personnel,» he adds.
The greatest positive contributions to the annual variation were presented in the lines Other vehicles and motorcycles, Fuels for motor vehicles and Alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, contributing 2.3 percentage points to the total variation of retail trade.
In the negative contribution occurs in the line of Vehicles and motorcycles for household use and others with -0.6 percentage points each.
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