Industry rebounds: +1.5% month-on-month, +1.4% year-on-year. Drugs boom, cars down

Drugs, once again, but not only. Istat data on industrial production in November show a broader recovery phase, with an average growth of 1.5% over the previous month, 1.4% in annual terms.

While progress in pharmaceuticals (+8.7%) remains the most robust, positive performances were also recorded for electronics, machinery and metallurgy. Braking the averages, once again, are means of transport (-3.1%) dragged down by motor vehicles (-7.6%), just as down by almost three points is the chemical sector. The food sector declined by one point, while textiles-clothing remained at the pole. The balance of the 11 months improves but remains negative (-0.5%) and at this point, as only the December survey is missing, it seems likely that manufacturing production in Italy will also fall in 2025, i.e. for the third consecutive year, after -2% in 2023 and -4% the following year. The seasonally adjusted index now stands at 94.8, thus almost five points below the 2021 average levels taken as a reference.

Positive data, but once again interlocutory, affected by a picture in the balance in several respects, starting with the international scenario. With the start of 2026 - ISTAT reports - marked by new hotbeds of instability that support forecasts of a slowdown in economic activity at international level for the current year. Difficulties that also reverberate in the qualitative indicators of companies. If, on average, taking into account trade and construction, the confidence index in the latest December survey is improving, the same is not true for manufacturing, which instead sees every variable oriented downwards, with a drop of more than one point. Not brilliant numbers are also reported on the international sales front. For non-EU markets, the November figure was in fact negative (-3.3%), lowering the eleven-month growth to just two percentage points. Over the ten months (here the figures are totals, Europe is also included), progress was 3.4%, but these gains were almost entirely attributable to a single sector, pharmaceuticals (+34%), while elsewhere, among chemicals and textiles-clothing, rubber-plastics and electronics, machinery and cars, only stagnation or a reduction in values was experienced.

Decisive for the evolution of the manufacturing picture in Italy will be the performance of the German economy, which continues to send mixed and interlocutory signals. The GDP 2025, in the estimates released a short while ago by the Berlin statistical institute, grew by 0.2%, as did the fourth quarter of the year, thus close to stagnation. In November, however, German industrial production grew slightly (+0.8% both on a monthly basis and in annual terms), driven in particular by the performance of cars. The index, at the end of an almost continuous slowdown over the last three years, is seven points below the 2021 level, and in general in the first 11 months of the year production fell by 1.2%.Slightly better data could come in December, at least judging by domestic car production, which grew by 17%, bringing the annual total to 4.15 million units, two points above the 2024 level. This is comforting data, even though ten years earlier domestic production in Germany stood at 5.7 million cars, numbers that currently certify a production gap of 27% compared to 2015. Nothing, however, compared to the collapse experienced in Italy, which in 10 years has seen its already limited domestic car production fall by almost 70%: we are now down to just over 200,000 units, a twentieth of Berlin's production, and to find lower values we need to go back to 1954.

Industrial production is growing again in November 2025. Istat estimates that the seasonally adjusted index of industrial production increased by 1.5% compared to October. Net of calendar effects, in November 2025 the overall index increased in trend terms by 1.4%, with 20 calendar working days as in November 2024.