The general business climate index for the agricultural machinery industry in Europe continues to be in the negative range, but has improved significantly compared to the previous month. Unlike the previous one, the current recession phase may only prove to be a comparatively shorter, temporary correction.
However, the improvement of the overall turnover expectations is due less to an increase in participants with growth expectations, but rather to the fact that more participants expect an unchanged instead of a declining turnover. Furthermore, only 14% of participants expect incoming orders to increase, while a record of 59% foresee neither an increase nor a decrease in incoming orders. A large proportion of them may simply be undecided, which again indicates that there is great uncertainty in the industry about the near future.
On the other hand, the volume of orders has returned to a high level (corresponding to a production period of 3.3 months). Orders from dealers seem to have picked up again. The dealers apparently see good conditions in the end customer market for selling off their stocks.
In any case, incoming orders from Europe, by nature the most important market for the industry in Europe, showed an average increase last month for the first time after several months of decline. Also with regard to the individual European countries, the participants have revised their expectations upwards for the second time in a row for almost all regions, with Scandinavia at the top and the UK still deeply negative at the bottom of the ranking.
