Staff Reporter
Karachi
The Pakistan Industrial and Traders Association Front has said that the positive growth in large-scale manufacturing (LSM) will help create jobs if the trend continues in coming months, as the large industries have bounced back last month, posting a healthy growth of nearly 10 percent.
PIAF Chairman Mian Nauman Kabir, in a joint statement along with senior vice chairman Nasir Hameed and vice chairman Javed Iqbal, observed that the LSM output increased by 9.66 percent in December over the same month of the last year, breaking a cycle of constant contraction in past over one year.
He said that this trend helped bring the overall cumulative contraction in the LSM sector down to 3.4 percent during July-December period of fiscal year 2019-20. During five months, the contraction in LSM sector was close to 6%, which significantly came down to 3.4 percent due to better performance in large industries in December.
He said that large businesses were bearing the brunt of very high interest rate, documentation drive by the Federal Board of Revenue and high energy prices.
PIAF chairman warned that current trends suggest that the government would miss its annual growth targets in three major sectors, including agriculture, industry and services, stressing the need for dropping markup rate and energy prices to stimulate industrial growth further.
In its first quarterly report, the central bank noted that while large export-oriented and import-competing industries remained bullish on fundamentals, they refrained from taking a long-term view. Quoting the data of PBS, he said that out of 15 major industries, eight recorded growth while the output in seven industries contracted in the July-December period.
Data collected by the Oil Companies Advisory Committee (OCAC) showed that 11 types of industries registered on an average 0.7% negative growth in the July-December period of the current fiscal year. But in December alone, the OCAC-monitored industries reported 0.1% growth.
