Construction industry confidence down

These are the latest findings from the Roy Morgan Research Monthly Business Confidence Survey conducted between the 3rd and 18th of August:

The Roy Morgan Business Confidence Survey commenced in December 2010 at a time when the share market had been improving and some optimism was coming back into the market, the Business Confidence Survey reflects this opinion with a level of 131.5 in December 2010 and stayed around this point to April 2011 (128.2).

With the dramatic drop in the ASX in early August it was decided to conduct an additional survey to measure the impact that this may have had on business confidence, the chart shows that the result for August was up marginally to 102.1 from 99.8 in July.

The reason for this perhaps surprising result is that businesses showed some increased optimism about how economic conditions would be likely to improve over the following one to five years from the current low position.

 “The apparent stability in Business Confidence masks the fact that we definitely have a two speed economy. There has been a dramatic fall in confidence in July and August amongst Manufacturers, Agriculture, Retail and Construction to a level that now puts them below the business average and well below the confidence levels shown for other industries including mining,” said Norman Morris, industry communications director for Roy Morgan Research.

The Manufacturing sector has been particularly hard hit by recent events having fallen to the lowest level of confidence among the major industry sectors (81.1), followed by Construction (83.9), Agriculture (84.8) and Retail (89.4).

For more information visit: www.roymorgan.com.au