The Turkish State Institute of Statistics (DIE) has announced figures showing that manufacturing industry in the country operated at 71.7% of capacity in June this year, compared with 76.7% in the same month of 2000.

The statistics were obtained by polling 678 businesses. Of those questioned, 58.7% blamed low domestic demand as the main reason for running below capacity. Poor conditions in export markets were only mentioned by 10% of respondents.

Other problems that the research highlighted were the unavailability of local raw materials (cited by 7.2%), labour shortages (2.6%) and financial shortages (3.5%).

The good news is that a large proportion of those surveyed (41.4%) believed that July would have shown an increase in capacity. Others thought that domestic sales would increase, while a majority (55.7%) thought that prices would rise in July.

For July, 41.4 % of businesses polled expect an increase in their output, while 17.7 % expect a decline. For the same month, 46.9 % anticipate that domestic sales will increase, while 17.5 % expect a decrease. Around 55.7 % of businesses said sales prices will rise in July, while 3.1 % expect them to fall. With regard to raw material prices, 40.6 % expect them to rise and 0.2 % to fall.