In February 2023, industrial activity in Mexico grew 0.73% per month, marking its best pace in the last 14 months, according to data reported this Tuesday by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (Inegi).
This is the best advance since the jump of 0.88% reported in December 2021 and is also higher than expected by the consensus of analysts (+0.2%), but it is not clear that this growth is a sign of strength of the economy towards the following months, according to analysts.
The reason can be seen in the dynamics of the indicator, already at a disaggregated level. Of the 29 sub-indices that make it up (which are grouped, in turn, into four categories: mining, public services, construction and manufacturing), 15 had improvements, but two in particular had outstanding progress.
The first was that of services related to mining, with a notable advance of 11.29% and the second was that of civil engineering works, which grew 8.45 percent. In contrast, most of the manufacturing subsectors (13 of 21) performed negatively.
“The vast majority of the subsectors had a more passive performance and instead the jump (in industrial activity as a whole) is due to increases of 8.45% per month in civil engineering works and 11.29% in services related to mining, which depend to a large extent on the use of federal budget resources. On the other hand, the elements most linked to the economic cycle, such as construction (-1.93% monthly) or manufacturing (-0.47%), had losses, so the general outlook for the industry continues to be challenging,” said Marcos Arias, economic analyst of the Monex Financial Group.
