Weak industrial orders add to gloom for German economy

German industrial orders declined in June as the debt crisis crimped domestic demand and in the euro area, official data showed on Tuesday. The economy ministry said in a statement that industrial orders dropped 1.7 percent in June from May, more than wiping out the modest 0.7-percent increase of that month. Analysts polled by Dow Jones had been pencilling in a decline of around 1.0 percent for June. The fall was largely due to fewer domestic orders, which were down 2.1 percent month-on-month, and a 4.9-percent drop in orders from eurozone countries, the ministry explained. Orders from outside the euro area edged up 0.6 percent month-on-month. By sector, orders for consumer goods were little changed, slipping 0.1 percent, while orders for semi-finished goods and capital goods declined by 3.2 percent and 1.0 percent respectively, the data showed. Newedge Strategy analyst Annalisa Piazza said that "all in all, the data were quite gloomy, even for the 'resilient' German economy." The current cyclical slowdown was hurting exports, so "the export-led German industrial sector is not going to be spared from the slump in trade activity," she said. Commerzbank economist Ulrike Rondorf also saw the data as a sign that "the crisis in the eurozone is having an increasing impact on core countries of the monetary union." With surveys indicating that German companies are assessing their business situation much more pessimistically than earlier in the year, negative "data from manufacturing (is) quite likely in the third quarter too," she said. Unicredit analyst Alexander Koch noted that the industrial orders data were traditionally volatile. "But looking ahead, recent business survey results uniformly signal a renewed weakening in overall order activity at the beginning of second half of this year," he said.