catalan exports

The factory that the Japanese car multinational has in Barcelona will be working 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for the first time in its 30 years of existence in order to produce the Pulsar saloon car and the NV200 van. In addition, it will hire 686 new temporary workers to deal with this production increase. As from the 20^th of October, Nissan will hire 86 new staff that will strengthen the current night shift on week days, which will be covered by 500 workers in total. Furthermore in early January, 600 additional staff will be hired to work on the weekends until later March. Nissan decided to allocate the production of its Pulsar saloon car to Barcelona in February 2013, after the company and trade unions reached an agreement to improve competitiveness. Furthermore, in Barcelona in May 2014, it started to assemble its first electric van model.

In 2015, Catalonia will receive the lowest investment from the Spanish Government in the last 17 years, in relative terms. The Executive chaired by Mariano Rajoy will only spend 9.5% of the territorial investments in Catalonia, despite the fact that the Autonomous Community accounts for 19% of Spain's GDP and 16% of the country's population. The percentage is even lower than last year's, when Rajoy allocated 9.6% of the territorial investments to Catalonia, which leads Spain's economy. In the current political climate, when the relation between Catalonia and Spain is seriously questioned by a majority of Catalans, such figures are far from supporting the "better together" way.

Catalonia’s GDP recorded an annual increase of 1.4% in the second quarter of 2014, the best result since September 2008, according to official figures published on Friday by the Catalan Institute of Statistics (IDESCAT). The 1.8% increase in domestic demand means that the annual rate of Catalonia’s GDP is higher than Spain's average, and more than that of the European Union (EU28), both located at 1.2%. Not only is Government spending showing a favourable trend, but there has also been growth in the services sector, and those of industry and agriculture. From September 2014, the EU has set mandatory implementation of the new European System of Accounts (ESA 2010), which IDESCAT plans to have in place to coincide with the results of the GDP in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Last July, Catalonia broke its export record ever achieved in a single month, reaching €5.67 billion. This marked a 6.9% growth from the same month in 2013. Furthermore, Catalan sales abroad reached another record high in the period between January and July of 2014, at €35.44 billion, an increase of 2.6% from last year's same period. Meanwhile, exports have increased throughout the rest of Spain by 1.3% between January and July in their 2013 figures. Nowhere is the export growth faster than in Catalonia, which counts for 25.2% of Spain's total.

Exports from Catalonia between January and June 2014 reached €29,769.5 million, which represent a 1.8% increase compared to the same period last year. They also represented 24.9% of Spain's total exports, which reached €119,265 million, a 0.5% growth on the previous year's figures. However, despite growing at a slower pace, Spain's total exports posted a new historical record since comparable figures started to be registered in 1971. Considering just the June figures, the export sector seemed to be affected by the negative economic figures from France and Germany. Catalan exports only grew by 0.1% in June compared to the figures registered in the same month of 2013, while Spain's total exports during the first sixth months of the year decreased by 1.2%.

The pace of the Catalan economic recovery is "accelerating" according to Miquel Valls, the President of Barcelona's Chamber of Commerce. This is especially apparent in the second quarter of this year, which saw the interannual GDP grow by 1.3%, compared to the 0.4% growth registered in the first quarter of 2014. This rapid acceleration will oblige the Chamber to review in its autumn report its economic forecasts for Catalonia in 2014 and 2015, which are currently set at 1.2% and 1.5% respectively. Although there is still uncertainty to exactly what shape the new economic climate will take, the new predictions of growth could be above 1.5% for 2014 and 2% in 2015, indicated Valls.

63% more exports have been channelled through the Port of Barcelona during the first six months of 2014 than in the same period of 2008, prior to the economic crisis. On Friday, the President of Barcelona Port Authority, Sixte Cambra, announced that 2014 will be the year of record sums of exports and imports from the Catalan port. The Port finished the first half of 2014 with 22.5 million tons of goods transported, representing an increase of 7% compared with the same period of 2013. Cambra said that growth occurred in all cargo sections of the port, driven by foreign trade, especially exports.

''The recovery has come and has come to stay,'' according to Salvador Guillermo, Director of the Economy of Catalonia's main association of business-owners, Foment del Treball. Guillermo, who coordinated the report published on Tuesday, said that the analysis of economic data confirms that the positive trends have been occurring a month earlier in Catalonia than in the rest of Spain, "which means that recovery is more entrenched'' in Catalonia. The agents of this recovery are internal demand (consumption and investment) and the fast pace of exports in Catalonia.

The Catalan industrial sector received €1.365 billion of direct foreign investment in 2013, the highest amount since 2005, according to Barcelona’s Chamber of Commerce. This represents 52% of the total foreign investment in Spain’s industrial sector in 2013, while Catalonia represents around 19% of Spanish GDP. Across all sectors Catalonia received a total of €3.51 billion of foreign investment last year, 31% more than in 2012. In addition, the President of the Chamber, Miquel Valls, emphasized that foreign investment in Catalonia went mostly to the industrial sector and advanced services, while in the rest of Spain it mostly went to the recreational and real estate sectors. According to Valls, this indicates that international investors have identified Catalonia with “a new production model”, while this has not happened in the rest of Spain.

Exports from companies based in Catalonia reached €14.69 billion during the first 3 months of 2014, a 4.1% increase on the same period of 2013. Catalan exports stagnated in 2013 on 2012 figures, with 0.1% growth, after a few years of significant increase. The figures from the first quarter of 2014 point towards a recovery of export growth, mostly thanks to the month of March, when exports grew by 7.8% compared to the same month of 2013. In the whole of Spain, exports increased by 3.2% in the first quarter and Catalonia represented 25.2% of total Spanish exports. The chemical industry accounted for 27.6% of Catalan exports, followed by capital goods and the car industry. 65.4% of Catalonia’s exports went to European Union markets, while exports to Asia accounted for 9%.

The Catalan economy grew by 0.4% in the first quarter of 2014, which means that GDP has been increasing for the last 4 consecutive quarters, leaving recession far behind, according to an early estimate published on Monday by Catalonia’s Statistics Institute (Idescat) and the Catalan Ministry of the Economy and Knowledge. Furthermore, between March 2013 and March 2014, Catalonia’s economy grew by 0.8%. In the second quarter of 2013 it registered a quarterly growth of 0.1%; in the third it also posted a 0.1% quarterly growth; between October and December, it increased by 0,2%; and now, between January and March, it grew by 0.4%. The services sector has been the main engine behind this positive trend; in the last 12 months it grew by 1.4%.

Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister of Spain, and Artur Mas, President of the Catalan Government, both attended a business forum in Barcelona on Thursday. However, their attendance did not coincide at the event, since Rajoy did not come to hear Mas' speech and the Catalan President did not wait for the arrival of the Spanish PM. Both politicians were making visible the lack of dialogue between them regarding Catalonia's self-determination demands. In recent weeks, Rajoy has been repeating his demand that Mas give up the intention to organise a self-determination vote totally as the sine-qua-non condition for him to start talking. However, Mas considers Rajoy's condition "an imposition" and demonstrating a lack of political will, since Rajoy refuses to discuss the issue a majority of Catalans want to talk about.

In the first two months of 2014 exports by Catalan companies increased by 2.2% on the same period last year, according to figures released on Wednesday by the Spanish Ministry for the Economy and Competitiveness. In fact, Catalan companies were behind 25.3% of all exports from Spain. Spain's exports in January and February reached €37.76 billion, a 4% increase on figures from the same period last year. In addition, the amount reached in the first two months of 2014 represents an historical record. The main industries behind those numbers are food, drinks, and tobacco, as well as manufacturing and automation.  The main markets for Spanish products were the UK, Portugal, the United States and Germany.

The Port of Barcelona handled 10.7 million tons of goods during the first 3 months of 2014, which represents a 9% increase on the same period last year. Between January and March, all the types of transported goods posted a significant growth, and the same trend applies to the traffic of passengers, which grew by 9%. In the first quarter of the year, the number of vehicles transported grew by 5%, as did the number of containers, which reached 428,720 TEU. Container imports increased by 7% and exports by 3%. Container exports grew particularly to countries such as China (+31%), the United States (+17%), Morocco (+35%) and Mexico (+87%). The traffic of bulk liquids increased by 24%, particularly diesel and other fuel, as well as chemical products.

The President of the Port of Barcelona, ??Sixte Cambra, said on Wednesday that the total container traffic had reached around one million TEUs for the full year (the reference unit for cargo ships, equivalent to 20 feet containers). “This is the record number of the best pre-crisis times, which happened in 2007” stated Cambra during an informational breakfast in Madrid. The President of the Port of Barcelona also underlined the change in trends since in 2007, in spite of the record number of containers, “more than 60% were imports; in 2013 over 60% were exported containers.”