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Rabat – More than a third of business owners in one survey said that sales within the industrial sector fell at the end of August compared to the previous month.
According to a survey from Morocco’s Central Bank, Bank Al-Maghreb (BAM), 28% of business owners maintain that business operations in August have largely stagnated, while 32% reported positive monthly results.
In terms of production, around 38% of business owners report decreased production output, 34% say that production has stagnated and only 27% report a rise in production.
Based on the survey results, BAM concludes that business activities regressed across all of Morocco’s industrial sectors except for the food processing and electronic components manufacturing sub-sectors.
In the course of August, the industrial sector’s overall production dropped to a Capacity Utilization Rate (CUR) of 69%, a month-on-month decrease of two points, the BAM report specifies.
Despite the current stagnation in both production and sales, business owners are more optimistic about the prospect of increased production in the course of the following three months, with 45% of surveyed business owners saying they are optimistic about rising production levels, against only 32% a month earlier.
Read also: Over 58,000 New Businesses Emerged in Morocco in 2021
Echoing the sentiment on production, business owners are equally more optimistic about the prospect of recovered sales in the course of the following three months, with 38% saying they expect sales to increase, against 33% in July.
The survey’s results further reveal that uncertainty about future operations is slowly dissolving. In the August survey, only 16% of business owners said that they have no visibility as to near-term future operations given market uncertainty, down from 30% a month earlier.
