Spanish companies remain confident that business activity will increase over the coming 12 months amid a favourable economic backdrop, according to the latest IHS Markit Business Outlook survey.
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New orders are also set to rise, with improving workloads predicted to feed through to job creation and greater investment.
On the price front, inflation of both input costs and output charges is expected to remain stable.
A net balance of +43% of companies expect activity to rise over the coming year, with the net balance in February a fraction higher than the reading of +42% seen last October.
Firms generally expect economic conditions to improve, both in Spain and further afield.
There are still some concerns about the prospect of political instability in Catalonia, particularly among service providers, but much less so than was seen back in October.
Manufacturing firms and service providers are equally confident that activity will expand.
This represents a slight improvement in sentiment at manufacturers, while services confidence is unchanged from the previous outlook survey.
The activity net balance for Spain is in line with that seen at the eurozone level amid broad-based confidence in the currency bloc.
Sentiment is stronger than the global average (+33%).
Confidence around new business and revenues is also relatively stable at the start of the year.
With workloads continuing to rise, companies in Spain expect to take on extra staff over the next 12 months.
Hiring expectations are slightly lower than they were at the end of last year, but remain broadly in line with the euro area average.
As is the case with business activity, the manufacturing and service sectors share similar outlooks with regards to employment.
Stable confidence encourages firms to invest for the future, and expectations are for further increases in capital investment.
This is particularly the case in the manufacturing sector, where sentiment is the highest for a year.
Manufacturers are also set to boost spending on R&D.
As is the case with capex, optimism around R&D expenditure is the highest since the February 2017 outlook survey.
Although Spanish companies expect input costs to rise over the coming year, inflation looks set to be stable as the net balance is unchanged from that seen in the previous survey.
At +31%, the reading for Spain is below the eurozone average of +40%. ■