BNDES says industries resume use of productive capacity
Folha de S. Paulo
The President of the BNDES (National Development Bank), Luciano Coutinho, said yesterday that in this third quarter the industrial sector is already close to recovering the level of use of the installed capacity seen before the crisis, a fact that will lead to the resumption of the investments in new projects. Without mentioning numbers or applications for financing filed with the State bank, the executive affirmed that the recovery of the economy that is underway "induces the companies to invest". "In this quarter, we will probably be close to returning to the level of use of the productive capacity that starts inducing generalized decisions of investment. In this regard, the perspective of resumption of the good investment allows us to think about the sustainable recovery of the economy", affirmed Coutinho.
In accordance with the last data available, the use of the industrial capacity has increased, but it is still distant from the pre-crisis level. It stayed at 80.5% in July, above the 79.7% from June, according to the CNI (National Confederation of the Industry). However, the percentage is below the 83.8% from July 2008, when the economy was at a fast pace. Coutinho emphasized, nonetheless, that in order to keep the country with a vigorous growth and without inflation it is necessary to keep an investment rate of nearly 20% of the GDP - level near that achieved prior to the crisis. In the second quarter, the rate stayed at 15.7%.
Despite the optimism of the executive, the representative of the ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) in Brazil, Renato Balman, said it is important to export and one of the difficulties to trigger the exports is the lack of a coordinated industrial policy all over Latin America. For Josué Gomes da Silva, CEO of the textile industry Coteminas, the valuation of the Real worsens this Brazilian disadvantage even more especially because Brazil competes with countries from Asia that control the exchange and the flow of capitals (China, India and others).