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 compared to the previous version: Data for a new period has been added. Seasonally adjusted results for all periods before January 2026 have been re-adjusted. This is in line with the new method, where the results are only finalized after seasonal adjustment has been performed based on results over a full number of years.

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? The results for the next month are expected to be published on March 30, 2026.