HANOI: The national index of industrial production (IIP) increased 7.9 per cent 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 per cent growth recorded in the first nine months last year, and 7.2 per cent in the first eight months of this year, GSO said. While the first quarter IIP growth was 3.9 per cent, it surged to 8.1 per cent in the second quarter. The office estimates third quarter growth at 9.7 per cent. 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 per cent, contributing 9 percentage points to the overall IPP. This helped offset the strong drop of 8.1 per cent 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 per cent), prefabricated metal products (14.2 per cent), metal production (21.4 per cent) and rubber and plastic products (11.6 per cent).
Among key industrial products that posted high IIP increases in nine months were television sets (31.6 per cent), raw steel and iron (28 per cent), urea (15.9 per cent), fabric (16.8 per cent) and processed seafood (9.4 per cent). However, some other sectors saw lower growth rates, such as food processing (6.6 per cent), cloth (6.3 per cent), beverage (5 per cent) and coal and lignite exploitation (2 per cent). Some sectors recorded industrial production declines. Medicine, pharmaceutical chemicals and pharmaceutical material production went down by 1.7 per cent, tobacco by 2 per cent and crude oil and natural gas by 10.7 per cent. Locales where the IIP registered high growth were HCM City at 7.8 per cent; Cần Thơ at 6.9 per cent; Bình Dương at 9.5 per cent; Đồng Nai at 8.3 per cent and Đà Nẵng at 8.9 per cent; besides Bắc Ninh at 25.1 per cent; Hải Phòng at 20.1 per cent and Hà Nội at 6.7 per cent.
According to the GSO, the consumption index of the processing and manufacturing industry rose 9.9 per cent year-on-year, higher than the growth of 9 per cent 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 per cent, 0.01 per cent higher than the growth recored in the first seven months.
