Headlines:
- Regional PMI’s improve significantly in March
- The koruna has lagged behind its peers
On Friday, the Czech koruna clearly underperformed its regional peers and despite the improved sentiment even tested 200 days moving average (EUR/CZK 24.90) in intraday trading. Meanwhile, the forint and the zloty posted some gains - the EUR/HUF cross rate edged back below 294 level. Regarding the fresh PMI figures, they have showed an improvement in business sentiment across the whole region. The most significant increase took place in Hungary – the overall index surged to 56.8 point in March (from 50.5 in February). Thus, the figure suggests that the Hungarian industry is on a positive path. The latest known “hard” data on industrial production (January) unveiled that the most significant branches (as far as the value added is concerned), namely the car industry and the manufacture of machinery and equipment, remain in a good shape.
Like in Hungary, the result of the Czech PMI indicates that Czech enterprises managed to take advantage of a positive development in Germany. Moreover, it is encouraging to see that the result was driven by stronger new orders. On the contrary, Polish PMI showed only a negligible improvement by 0.1 point. However, we think that this is more or less a result of a still-good condition of the Polish economy and a higher interest rate, which should weigh on the growth in 2012.