European Foundry Industry Sentiment

March 2021: Fur­ther improve­ment of the cur­rent busi­ness situation

The European Foundry Industry Sen­ti­ment Indic­ator (FISI) con­tin­ues its recov­ery trend. Com­pared to the his­tor­ical pre­vi­ous month, how­ever, the recov­ery of the European foundries’ busi­ness cli­mate loses dynam­ics. With an increase of 1.0 index points in March, the first quarter closes at a level of 105.3 points and is thereby roughly at the pre-crisis level again.

The driv­ing forces for this increase are the assess­ments of the cur­rent situ­ation among iron and steel foundries. Mean­while, the non-fer­rous foundries are suf­fer­ing from the con­tinu­ing uncer­tain­ties in inter­na­tional vehicle man­u­fac­tur­ing, which for months are determ­ined by sup­ply bot­tle­necks of semi­con­duct­ors. In addi­tion, the enthu­si­asm of the pre­vi­ous month has been dampened by a slightly neg­at­ive side­ways move­ment of expectations.The mod­er­ately more scep­tical out­look for the com­ing months is mainly caused by the dis­cus­sions and uncer­tain­ties regard­ing the sup­ply and usage of vac­cines, which in March dis­rup­ted the vac­cin­a­tion strategies of sev­eral European countries.

Mean­while, the Euro­zone Busi­ness Con­fid­ence Indic­ator (BCI) is back in pos­it­ive ter­rain for the first time since August 2019. The index has increased for the tenth con­sec­ut­ive month and is now at the new level of 0.29, fol­low­ing the 0.4 points improvement.

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 the European Foundry Asso­ci­ation (CAEF) 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