Production ahead slowly: +0.3% yearly, +1% monthly. Cars falling at -30%.

Three decimal places up. Not much, actually, but enough to break the long sequence of minus signs in industrial production, on an annual basis in uninterrupted decline since February 2023. April in the Istat data breaks the trend, annual progress of 0.3%, which on a monthly basis is larger, a growth of one point. However, these data do not change the general picture, all the more so if we look at manufacturing in the narrow sense: excluding mining and energy from the calculation there is once again an annual drop, a 0.1% slowdown determined in particular by pharmaceuticals and means of transport, while after months of a fall the fashion sector returns to close to parity.

On the other hand, food and chemicals grew, as did wood/paper, metals and electronics, helping to keep the average close to parity.

Among the worst sectors, once again there is the auto industry, with vehicles giving up 30% year-on-year in terms of production. While the brightest sector, a sign of the times and not at all reassuring, is arms and ammunition, with production doubling.

At the macro sector level, only consumer durables are up year-on-year, while capital goods and intermediate goods are losing ground. April's data slightly shift the performance of 2025, which sees industrial production for the first four months falling by 1.2%, a drop that doubles when looking at manufacturing alone. Data that, as the months go by, increasingly mark 2025 as a year of transition, a hypothesis supported in the latest forecast by Prometeia and Intesa Sanpaolo: if in current values, manufacturing revenues could grow by 1.8%, some 20 billion over 2024 levels (1143 billion), this is still a lower value than the peaks (1163) of the two-year period 2022-2023. Progress that is still limited in constant values, which are seen growing by only two decimal places. Moreover, this scenario is consistent with what has been communicated by the main forecasting bodies, starting with ISTAT, which, like OECD and Bankitalia, estimates a 0.6% progress for our GDP in 2025.

Which, taking into account an acquired growth of 0.5 per cent in the first quarter (Istat estimate), points to a sequence of successive quarters of almost zero growth. Even in Europe's leading manufacturing sector, Germany, the picture remains in the balance, with industrial orders making slight progress and uninspiring numbers in terms of output, although GDP in the first quarter was revised upwards to +0.4%, above expectations. The April data, however, showed industrial production declining by more than one point in the monthly comparison and by almost two points in the annual comparison.