Frankfurt am Main: Germany saw a sizeable dip in industrial orders in January, preliminary official figures showed on Friday, the latest sign of wind going out of the sails of Europe’s flagship economy.
New contracts were down 2.6 per cent month-on-month as the year started, statistics authority Destatis said in seasonally-adjusted figures.
That was well short of the modest 0.5 per cent increase forecast by analysts surveyed by Factset.
But the effect was slightly compensated by dramatically revised figures for December, which showed a 0.9 per cent increase in orders where initially the statisticians reported of -1.6 per cent, as a number of large contracts were reported late.
The “present ebbing in orders is a sign of a continuing economic slowdown in industry at the start of the year,” the economy ministry in Berlin acknowledged. — AFP
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