Producer confidence; sentiment indicator manufacturing industry, branches

Producer confidence is a sentiment indicator for the manufacturing industry that indicates the direction in which manufacturing production is expected to develop. The indicator is an unweighted arithmetic average of three component indicators from the Business sentiment survey of the manufacturing industry. Before the Producer confidence is calculated, seasonal effects are removed from the three component indicators. The questions concern the expected activity in the next three months, opinion on order books and opinion on stocks of finished products. Results of the latter question are inverted when calculating the producer confidence, since a surplus of finished products is seen as something negative.

The more optimistic or pessimistic manufacturing companies are, the more positive or negative the value of the producer confidence indicator is compared with the zero line, and the greater the expectation that manufacturing production in the coming months will increase or decrease respectively. The producer confidence indicator has been available since 1985. For the sectors of manufacturing industry given in this table, the results are available from the start of 1994. This publication is created using co-financing by the European Commission.

Data available from: January 1985

Status of the figures: The results are provisional during the reporting year. The results will be declared final in the first month following the reporting year.

Changes as of January 29th 2026: Figures of January 2026 have been added. From January 2026, the newly added seasonally adjusted results will be provisional during the year. These results will be adjusted in January of the following year and then finalized.

Changes as of September 4th 2025: Corrections have been made to previously supplied data for the manufacture of metals. For this reason figures for producer confidence indicator component ‘Stocks of finished products’ has been adjusted for 24-25 Man. of basic metals and -products and C Manufacturing.

When will new figures be published? Figures of February 2026 are expected to be published the 26th of February 2026. Seasonally adjusted results for all periods before January 2026 will be adjusted once. This is in line with the new method, where the results are only finalized when seasonal adjustment is performed based on results over a whole number of years.