European Foundry Industry Sentiment

March 2023: Dif­fer­ent mar­ket signals

The European Foundry Industry Sen­ti­ment Indic­ator (FISI) records a decrease of 1.73 index points, bring­ing the index to a value of 105.9 points in March. This marks the first neg­at­ive month to month devel­op­ment since Octo­ber last year.

After the recently pos­it­ive trend, the decline at the cur­rent edge is affect­ing all mater­ial groups. The assess­ment of the cur­rent busi­ness situ­ation is under greater pres­sure than the expect­a­tions for the next six months. The most import­ant cus­tomer indus­tries of foundries partly show dif­fer­ent mar­ket sig­nals. While order back­logs in gen­eral engin­eer­ing are still at a very high level, new orders have been declin­ing notice­ably for months. Mean­while, in the auto­mot­ive industry pro­duc­tion is pick­ing up from his­tor­ic­ally low volumes due to the eas­ing of inter­na­tional sup­ply chains.

The Busi­ness Cli­mate Indic­ator (BCI) again holds its level in March. The decrease of 0.01 points brings the index to 0.70 points. Over­all, the selling price expect­a­tions for the month ahead are decreas­ing in com­par­ison to the pre­vi­ous month start­ing from a high level. 

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