European Foundry Industry Sentiment

April 2023: Eat from the stock

The European Foundry Industry Sen­ti­ment Indic­ator (FISI) records the second decrease in a row. Rat­ing of 0.5 index points lower than in March, the index reaches a value of 103.3 points in April.

What at first appears to be clearly neg­at­ive turns out to be less uni­form in the ana­lysis of the indi­vidual factors. European foundries recently assessed the cur­rent busi­ness situ­ation as bet­ter than in the pre­vi­ous month. Expect­a­tions for the com­ing six months, on the other hand, were more pess­im­istic. This is in con­trast to the devel­op­ment of the past months, in which the sig­ni­fic­ant gap between pess­im­istic expect­a­tions and a pos­it­ive assess­ment of the situ­ation began to diminish.

Work­ing off the order back­log leads to a more pos­it­ive assess­ment of the cur­rent busi­ness situ­ation than a month ago. It is to be expec­ted that the situ­ation will deteri­or­ate again over the com­ing months if order impulses do not become notice­able in the long term.

The Busi­ness Cli­mate Indic­ator (BCI) decreases by 0.14 points in April and brings the index to 0.54 points. Over­all, the selling price expect­a­tions for the month ahead are decreas­ing together with the pro­duc­tion expect­a­tion for the month ahead in com­par­ison to the pre­vi­ous month start­ing from a high level. A neg­at­ive stim­u­lus is fur­ther­more noted by the reduc­tion of the assess­ment of order-book levels. 

The FISI – European Foundry Industry Sen­ti­ment Indic­ator – is the earli­est avail­able com­pos­ite indic­ator provid­ing inform­a­tion on the European foundry industry per­form­ance. It is pub­lished by CAEF the European Foundry Asso­ci­ation every month and is based on sur­vey responses of the European foundry industry. The CAEF mem­bers are asked to give their assess­ment of the cur­rent busi­ness situ­ation in the foundry sec­tor and their expect­a­tions for the next six months.
The BCI – Busi­ness Cli­mate Indic­ator – is an indic­ator pub­lished by the European Com­mis­sion. The BCI eval­u­ates devel­op­ment con­di­tions of the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor in the euro area every month and uses five bal­ances of opin­ion from industry sur­vey: pro­duc­tion trends, order books, export order books, stocks and pro­duc­tion expectations.

CAEF Con­tact:

Till­man van de Sand
Sec­ret­ary Com­mis­sion for Eco­nom­ics & Stat­ist­ics
phone: +49 211 68 71 — 301
mail: tillman.vandesand@caef.eu