{"id":497570,"date":"2025-10-14T01:35:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T01:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/497570\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T01:35:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T01:35:14","slug":"output-falls-but-employment-up-in-ni-private-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/497570\/","title":{"rendered":"Output falls but employment up in NI private sector"},"content":{"rendered":"

But the Ulster Bank Regional Growth tracker today also said employment had risen, with companies reporting optimism about the year ahead.<\/p>\n

New order numbers \u201csoftened\u201d in three of the four sectors tracked by the bank \u2013 construction, services, manufacturing and retail.<\/p>\n

And its business activity index, which tracks output across all four sectors, fell from 47.3 in August to 44.9 in September.<\/p>\n

According to Ulster Bank, numbers of new orders have been falling for close to year in Northern Ireland, and September showed the sharpest decrease since April.<\/p>\n

The panellists who related their experiences to Ulster Bank gave several reasons for this, including \u201ceconomic uncertainty, contract delays and muted demand\u201d.<\/p>\n

Companies were not pessimistic about the medium-term outlook however, with the bank reporting the highest levels since May of optimism in an improvement in 12 month\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

Moreover, despite lower numbers of orders, staffing levels continued to increase across the private sector here.<\/p>\n

\"Output<\/p>\n

Output and new orders fell in Northern Ireland\u2019s private sector in the third quarter of 2025<\/p>\n

News Catch Up – Monday 13th October<\/p>\n

Reasons for the continuing rise in employment from survey respondents included long-standing vacancies being filled and the need to ensure sufficient capacity.<\/p>\n

With the lower levels of new orders, companies continued the now year-long trend of reduced backlogs, with the sharpest rate of depletion recorded since January.<\/p>\n

Another challenge faced by companies in September was lengthening delivery times, with panellists reporting \u201cstock shortages at suppliers\u201d.<\/p>\n

Despite a 10-month low in the rate of inflation, and a NI figure behind the UK average, input costs “continued to increase sharply\u201d, with respondents mentioning \u201chigher costs for electricity, IT services and raw materials\u201d.<\/p>\n

Output price inflation in Northern Ireland also registered a sharp rise, the highest of the 12 regions and nations in the UK that Ulster Bank tracks, albeit at the slowest rate here since January.<\/p>\n

Sebastian Burnside, chief economist for Ulster Bank, said: \u201cCompanies in Northern Ireland faced a challenging end to the third quarter of the year as they found it increasingly difficult to secure new orders and therefore scaled back business activity to a greater extent.<\/p>\n

\"Sebastian<\/p>\n

Sebastian Burnside, Ulster Bank chief economist<\/p>\n

\u201cNonetheless firms are still optimistic that better times lie ahead, and actually saw an improvement in business sentiment in September. This optimistic assessment of the future and associated planning is a key reason why firms continue to hire additional staff despite the falls in current workloads.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was some respite on the inflation front, with the pace of increase in costs slowing and coming in below the UK average. With output prices also rising at a weaker pace, firms may start to see an improvement in customer demand as we head towards the end of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

The business index is adjusted for the seasons in order to allow for annual variations in private sector activity, taking into account summer holidays and national holidays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But the Ulster Bank Regional Growth tracker today also said employment had risen, with companies reporting optimism about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5011],"tags":[9085,1144,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-497570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-northern-ireland","8":"tag-james-mcnaney","9":"tag-northern-ireland","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115369956401043348","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}