Bulgaria’s domestic industrial producer prices fell 0.6% y/y in April, following a 0.4% y/y decline in March, statistics office data showed. On a monthly basis, the PPI went down 0.4% in April, after rising 0.6% in March.
Producer prices in manufacturing dropped 3.5% y/y in April, deepening from a 3.1% y/y contraction a month earlier. Within manufacturing, the highest y/y price increase took place in basic metals (+8.1%), whereas the deepest decline was recorded in food products (-1.1%).
Notably, the deepest drop across the reported components of manufacturing is smaller than the overall decline for this section. A plausible explanation could be that the statistics office is not publishing separate price data for products of Bulgaria’s sole oil refinery due to confidentiality.
Producer prices in utilities increased 3.7% y/y in April, decelerating from a 4% y/y rise in March.
On the other hand, prices in mining went up 6.6% y/y in April, speeding up from a 1.4% y/y growth a month earlier. Prices rose y/y for all mining subsectors, including coal and lignite (+3.7%), metal ores (+13%) and other mining and quarrying (+0.5%).
The broader PPI, including sales abroad, edged down 0.1% y/y in April, reversing a 0.5% y/y increase in March.
| Domestic market PPI, % y/y | ||||
| Jan-15 | Feb-15 | Mar-15 | Apr-15 | |
| TOTAL | -1.9 | -1.2 | -0.4 | -0.6 |
| Mining and quarrying | -3.0 | -3.1 | 1.4 | 6.6 |
| Manufacturing | -5.3 | -4.2 | -3.1 | -3.5 |
| Utilities | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.0 | 3.7 |
| Source: NSI |
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