Why did Greek Industrial Production plummet in July ?

On Monday 9/9 ELSTAT published the Industrial Production Index reading for July, whose year over year % change stood at -8.1%. An absolutely dismal print which left me wondering what happened. I usually do not use ELSTAT’s data much, especially when it comes to industrial production since I think that the way they present data, is just awful and not user-friendly at all, so I just look at Eurostat. But this time my interest was piqued.

The fact that Industrial production was down 8,1% does not mean that manufacturing was down 8,1%. The industrial Production Index (IPI) besides manufacturing also includes Mining and Quarrying, Electricity and Water Supply.

As it turns out the culprit was Electricity, where production declined by a whopping 19,56%,  while Manufacturing declined by 4,3%.

source: ELSTAT

If one wants to look at how each one of the aforementioned individual components has fared over the past 5-6 years, here’s a chart.

source: ELSTAT, own calculations

Using 6-month moving averages, to smooth out noise a tiny bit, we can see that manufacturing outperforms all other components and is the only one whose 6-month MA currently stands at borderline positive territory.