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Tribune News Network
Doha
Production across Qatar's industrial sectors remained robust in April with the Industrial Production Index (IPI) growing 1.5 percent from March and 1.4 percent from April 2017.
The growth, according to the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics (MDPS) figures, is supported by increases in mining, manufacturing and electricity outputs.
IPI is a short-term quantitative index that measures the changes in the volume of production of a select basket of industrial products over a given period with respect to that in a chosen period called the base period.
The base year for Qatar's IPI is 2013.
It consists of three main components — mining with a relative importance of 83.6 percent, manufacturing with 15.2 percent and electricity and water with 0.7 percent and 0.5 percent respectively.
The IPI for mining in April showed an increase of 1.7 percent from March primarily due to increase in production of crude oil and natural gas by 1.6 percent and other mining and quarrying output by 0.7 percent. Year-on-year, the mining IPI showed an increase of 1.1 percent.
The IPI for manufacturing in April increased by 1.2 percent from March because of an increase in the production of three groups — beverages by 8.5 percent, refined petroleum products by 6.8 percent and chemicals and chemical products by 1.9 percent.
However, five other groups saw decline in outputs — basic metals by 9.3 percent, printing and reproduction of recorded media by 5.7 percent, manufacture of food products by 3.2 percent, manufacture of cement and other non-metallic mineral products by 2.1 percent and manufacture of rubber and plastics products by 1 percent.
In terms of annual change, the manufacturing IPI showed an increase of 4.6 percent. It was driven up by the increase in the production of refined petroleum products by 39.7 percent, food products by 10.3 percent, basic metals by 9.1 percent, beverages by 6.3 percent and rubber and plastics products by 6.2 percent.
However, three groups saw decline in outputs — cement and other non-metallic mineral products by 2.8 percent, printing and reproduction of recorded media by 2.6 percent and chemicals and its derivatives by 2.1 percent.
