Thailand’s industry confidence index continued to decline in August for eight consecutive months as investors remained worry of the sluggish economy.

Federation of Thai Industry (FTI) president Suphan Mongkolsuthee said the industry confidence index for the month August stood at 82.4 points, which is a continual decline for eight straight months in a row.He said the decrease is caused by worries on the sluggish domestic economy, the shrinking of domestic consumption, the lowering of produce prices, as well as the fragile global economy.

However he said entrepreneurs are now having high hopes that the new economic stimulus measures rolled out by the government currently would help stimulate more spending domestically.He said the private has suggested that the government should also come up with new measures to further reduce the taxation on the imports of machinery, along with creating new production factors to support SME businesses.

Car production rises 13%, but domestic sales drop 10%

The Thai Automotive Industry Association says car production last month rose by 13,% but sales in local market dropped.

The automotive club chairman of the committee on public relations Mr.Surapong Paisitpattanapong said automobile productions in August stood at 159,000 units, an increase of about 13 percent from the same period in the previous year.

He said that total vehicle productions in the past eight months currently stands at 1.26 million cars, 780,000 of which have already been exported.
He was confident that the target export of 1.2 million vehicles this year should be achieved as planned.

However he pointed out that domestic automotive sales remained low in the month of August, or 9.9 percent lower than last year’s figure during the same period.
He said that the targeted vehicle sales of at least 800,000 cars domestically for the year, would probably be missed.

Source: Thai PBS English News