'Higher production costs impact manufacturing competitiveness'

Rising production costs significantly impacted manufacturing competitiveness in the last few months, according to a survey.
Industry body FICCI's latest quarterly survey on manufacturing suggests slight decline for the manufacturing sector outlook in the fourth quarter (January-March) of the last fiscal, as the percentage of respondents reporting higher production and exports in fourth quarter have declined as compared to the previous quarter.
The percentage of respondents reporting lower production has reduced by half over the previous quarter thereby indicating a more stable outlook in months to come, the report said.
The proportion of respondents reporting higher growth during the January-March quarter has fallen from 48 per cent in October-December to 46 per cent.

Respondents reporting negative growth has come down to 14 per cent in January-March from 29 per cent as reported in the previous quarter, it added.
However, the percentage of respondents reporting fall in exports has reduced from 30 per cent in the previous quarter to 18 per cent in the January-March quarter.
The survey assessed the expectations of manufacturers for January-March quarter for twelve major sectors namely auto, capital goods, cement and ceramics, chemicals, electronics and electricals, food products, leather and footwear, machine tools, metal and metal products, paper products, textiles and technical textiles and textiles machinery.
Responses have been drawn from 320 manufacturing units from both large and SME segments with a combined annual turnover of over Rs 3.8 lakh crore.