Europe posted a trade surplus for a third month in June as the slump in exports eased, adding to evidence the region’s economy is near the end of the recession.
Exports from the 16-nation euro area dropped a seasonally adjusted 0.1 per cent from May, when they fell a revised 1.8 per cent, the European Union's statistics office in Luxembourg said today.
Imports were unchanged after a revised 2.5 per cent decline in May. The trade surplus narrowed to €1 billion in June from a revised €1.1 billion.
Companies across the euro area have cut production and their work force to weather the recession as orders dried up. While the economy contracted for a fifth quarter in the three months through June, Germany and France unexpectedly returned to growth, suggesting Europe's worst recession since World War II is coming to an end.
"This is not a sustainable recovery we see in the figures, this is scrambling up after the enormous blow at the beginning of the year," said Allard Bruinshoofd, a senior economist at Rabobank in the Netherlands.
Euro-area gross domestic product fell 0.1 per cent in the second quarter from the first, when it plunged a record 2.5 per cent, a report last week showed.
Exports to the UK, the largest market for euro-area goods, fell 27 per cent in the first five months of 2009 from a year earlier, while shipments to the US, the world's biggest economy, dropped 21 per cent, according to today's report. Exports to China declined 6 per cent.
Energy imports dropped 38 per cent in the five months through May and the trade deficit on energy products fell 37 per cent. Crude oil prices have fallen by more than half since reaching a record close to $150 a barrel in July 2008.
The euro extended its decline against the dollar after the report and was down 0.7 per cent at $1.4109 at 10.53 am in London.
The European Central Bank has cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low of 1 per cent and started buying as much as 60 billion euros of covered bonds to stimulate bank lending and boost investments and consumption.
German exports increased the most in almost three years in June, according to national data published on August 7th. The German and French economies both expanded 0.3 per cent in the three months through June after four consecutive quarters of contraction.
BMW delivered 109,923 vehicles in July, 13 per cent fewer than in the same period a year before. It saw a 0.3 per cent increase in sales of its Mini-branded cars.
"Over the course of the next months we will see BMW Group sales continue their gradual upward trend," Ian Robertson, BMW's sales chief, said on August 7th. The Munich-based company last week got an order for 132 BMW 7 series cars from Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to be used by the country's embassies around the world.
Still, plant and machinery orders in Germany declined 46 per cent in June from a year earlier when adjusted for inflation, the Frankfurt-based VDMA machine makers association said last month. Export orders slumped 45 per cent and domestic orders dropped 46 per cent.
Bloomberg