MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombia: Industrial output shows sharp increase

The 29.9% yoy growth is explained almost entirely by the increase in manufactures

Colombia's National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) Friday issued a report showing that the country's industrial output during the month of May of 2022 had grown 29.9% compared to the same month of 2021.

The sharp increase is explained by the fact that back then Colombia was going through a series of protests and social uprisings with road blockades and other measures. The variation is due to the “consequences of the national strike in May 2021”, DANE Director Juan Daniel Oviedo pointed out. He added that the three-year variation had a more moderate 6.4%.

In any case, the evolution of the Industrial Production Index (IPI), which in May was 109, evolves favorably with respect to the previous month when it was 105.3, which is in Oviedo's words “a very satisfactory result.”

The 29.9% year-on-year growth is “explained almost entirely by the growth of real manufacturing production”, Oviedo also emphasized. Thus, the manufacturing industry registered in May 2022 an annual variation of 46.2 %, contributing 27.2 percentage points to the total IPI.

“Although the manufacturing sector has an effective growth rate close to 5.25 %, mining and quarrying activities are behind a structural brake on the growth of the industrial sector,” said Oviedo.

Colombian industry had in previous months suffered a drop in production, which was reversed “by the good data we saw from fuel exports, in this case associated with the extraction of crude oil and natural gas that are contributing 5.2 p.p., almost the entire growth dynamics of mining and quarrying,” Oviedo insisted.

On the other hand, electricity and gas supply showed a variation of 10.7%, contributing 1.5 points to the IPI, and water collection, treatment, and distribution registered a 2% variation, contributing 0.1 percentage points to the index.

This year's IPI growth from January to May compared to the same period in 2021 was 12 %, according to DANE's document.