Japan Industrial Output: Updated September 4, 2024.

 

Japan industrial output in July up 2.8% on chip equipment rise

Article Source:  https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240830/p2g/00m/0bu/020000c

Ideas:

Japan might follow the industrial output more closely than other countries as manufacturing is still a major sector in the Japanese economy.

While 102.8 is still good its shows a trend of decrease of 4.2 decrease in June in manufacturing in Japan, which might have been attributed to the Toyota situation.

Japan is still playing catch-up with Taiwan and South Korea related to the semiconductor sector global race, as Japan has fallen significantly behind its two main rivals.

"Fluctuating indecisively" might the an understatement as the Japanese manufacturing sector as been up and down for many years due to the pandemic and the the global semiconductor shortage that hit global supplies significantly.

Yes, a an optimistic view at this time might not be correct but improving might be a better description of the manufacturing industry at this time.

Then, recently this year, there was the Toyota Motor Group situation which shutdown production at Toyota and other car companies that used fake data.

All sectors don't grow at the same speed, as some grow faster than others and some might decrease from quarter to quarter.

The industrial sector is a mixed bag of many different companies as sub-sectors as again, they are not all the same and they have different situations, different customers, different material needs and so on.

But again, as Japan is heavily focused on manufacturing and production, they watch all of the sub-sectors very carefully and they all contribute one way or another to the economy.

The index for industrial shipments is good as anything over 100 is a good number. For inventories, its seems good too, but need to be watched carefully as whenever there is a significant increase in inventories might mean demand is down, and or production estimates were not estimated correctly, leading to an increase in inventories.

Again, most of the time, manufacturing will have some up months and then some down months for a number or reasons, so possible decrease in September should not be a surprise.

And yes, Typhoons in Japan has significantly affect production as again Japan is a major typhoon region, which means there are usually typhoons in Japan in August and September.

Have nice day!