Industrial production index up 7.9%
The national index of industrial production (IIP) increased 7.9% year-on-year in the first nine months of this year, the General Statistics Office (GSO) reported.
 |
The metric was higher than the 7.1% growth recorded in the first nine months last year, and 7.2% in the first eight months of this year, GSO said.
While the first quarter IIP growth was 3.9%, it surged to 8.1% in the second quarter. The office estimates third quarter growth at 9.7%.
The GSO attributed this year’s IIP growth to the breakthroughs in the processing and manufacturing sector, which made big strides with a rise of 12.8%, contributing 9 percentage points to the overall IPP. This helped offset the strong drop of 8.1% in mining, which reduced 1.8 percentage points from the nine-month figure.
Many industries enjoyed significant growth including electronics, computer and optical products (25.1%), prefabricated metal products (14.2%), metal production (21.4%) and rubber and plastic products (11.6%).
Among key industrial products that posted high IIP increases in nine months were television sets (31.6%), raw steel and iron (28%), urea (15.9%), fabric (16.8%) and processed seafood (9.4%).
However, some other sectors saw lower growth rates, such as food processing (6.6%), cloth (6.3%), beverage (5%) and coal and lignite exploitation (2%).
Some sectors recorded industrial production declines. Medicine, pharmaceutical chemicals and pharmaceutical material production went down by 1.7%, tobacco by 2% and crude oil and natural gas by 10.7%.
Locales where the IIP registered high growth were HCM City at 7.8%; Can Tho at 6.9%; Binh Duong at 9.5%; Dong Nai at 8.3% and Danang at 8.9%; besides Bac Ninh at 25.1%; Haiphong at 20.1% and Hanoi at 6.7%.
According to the GSO, the consumption index of the processing and manufacturing industry rose 9.9% year-on-year, higher than the growth of 9% year-on-year in the first eight months of 2016, contributing to the production growth in this industry.
The GSO said that to continue growth in industrial production, the industrial sector should reduce inventory because the inventory index of the sector in the first eight months witnessed a year-on-year surge of 10%, 0.01% higher than the growth recorded in the first seven months.
