Confidence in the service, retail and construction sectors dropped in February, data from Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) indicated on Tuesday, revealing a dismal outlook regarding market activity.
Recording the attitude of business leaders through a series of polls on planned levels of investment and overall expectations, TurkStat said confidence in the service sector dropped from 92.53 in January to 89.24 in February. Confidence in the retail industry dropped 2.4 percent to 106.18, while falling 1.3 percent to 83.91 in the construction sector in the same period.
TurkStat calculates confidence indices based on a range of between 0 and 200 points, where a sub-100 score indicates a downbeat projection and more than 100 reflects an optimistic outlook. The decrease in the services confidence index stems from the decrease in the number of managers who are experiencing increased “demand-turnover” over the past three months and who expect rising demand in the coming three months.
The downturn in the retail trade confidence index was traced to the decrease in the number of managers who recorded increased business activity and sales in the past season. The number of managers who found current stock volumes below normal for the past season has risen, according to TurkStat. The decline in the construction confidence index was due to the decreased number of managers evaluating “current overall order books” as above seasonal norms.
In the meantime, the real sector confidence index, which was surveyed by the Central Bank of Turkey to assess morale in the manufacturing industry, saw a slight increase in February, rising from 103.3 in January to 104.5. The 200-point-range is also used in the central bank’s real sector confidence index.