European Foundry Industry Sentiment

May 2019: Broadly stable

The down­ward trend of the European Foundry Industry Sen­ti­ment is dimin­ish­ing. This is in con­trast to the decrease of the Busi­ness Cli­mate Indic­ator for the euro area.
Both cur­rent status and expect­a­tions of the European Foundry Industry broadly sta­bil­ised unex­pec­tedly com­pared to the pre­vi­ous month. This leads to the ques­tion of a pos­sible bot­tom form­a­tion in the near future. Besides, the European foundries assess the cur­rent busi­ness situ­ation and their expect­a­tions het­ero­gen­eous regard­ing the dif­fer­ent cast­ing mater­i­als. This is par­tic­u­larly due to the dif­fer­ent per­form­ances of their main cus­tomer indus­tries. In addi­tion, the US-China con­flict has intens­i­fied and the decision about pun­it­ive tar­iffs on pas­sen­ger cars and com­pon­ents has only been post­poned. Thus, the ongo­ing global uncer­tain­ties have still an impact.

The FISI – European Foundry Industry Sen­ti­ment Indic­ator – is an early indic­ator of 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 FISI is the earli­est avail­able indic­ator, provid­ing inform­a­tion about the mood in the foundry industry.
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.

Sophie Stef­fen
Sec­ret­ary Com­mis­sion for Eco­nom­ics & Statistics
phone: +49 211 68 71 — 301
sophie.steffen@caef.eu