MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chilean industrial production and sales fall at moderate pace

The ravaged salmon industry cut three percentage points from industrial output.

Chilean industrial output and sales fell less than expected in June, suggesting that the country’s economy could be climbing out of its deepest recession in a decade, according to the latest release from the Statistics Institute, INE.

Production fell 8.3% from a year earlier and industrial sales 6.6%, still impressive, but less than the medium decline forecasted.

Chile may be starting to stabilize after shrinking faster than expected in the first half of the year, Central Bank President Jose De Greogrio anticipated earlier this week.

The infectious salmon anaemia (ISA) virus that has ravaged the Chilean salmon industry since June 2008 cut 3 percentage points from total industrial output on lower production of fillets and frozen fish, according to the Statistics Institute.

An idea of the contraction caused by ISA is the impact on unemployment in the southern Los Lagos region, where much of the salmon production is based, and which soared to 9% in the three months through June from 2.9% a year earlier.

Nationwide unemployment increased to 10.7% in the second quarter, the highest since October 2004, after the economy shed 35.000 jobs, indicated INE.

In the first six months of the year, industrial output declined 9.6% from the same period a year earlier.