Throughout the year, mining has been the weakest pillar of industrial activity and in December alone it fell by 6.2%, linking 19 months of annual declines.
At the end of 2024, industrial activity in Mexico fell sharply and across the board, sealing a year in which it had its weakest performance since 2020.
Last December, it registered a 1.4% decrease compared to November, which represented its largest monthly drop since the 2.3% contraction in November 2023, according to figures released on Tuesday morning by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (Inegi).
The December decline was widespread, meaning that all four pillars of the indicator contributed to it, which is not often seen.
In order of magnitude, the setbacks were seen as follows: construction fell by 2.1%; electricity, gas and water services by 1.9%; manufacturing by 1.2%; and mining by 1%; according to figures from the Monthly Indicator of Industrial Activity (IMAI) of Inegi.
This weakness is not new. In year-on-year comparisons, industrial activity recorded four consecutive months of decline in December, falling by 2.4%. In September, October and November, the declines were 0.1%, 3.3% and 1.1%, respectively.
Throughout the year, mining has been the weakest pillar of industrial activity and in December alone it fell by 6.2%, linking 19 months of annual declines.
However, given its weight in the overall indicator, construction is the sector that has recently contributed most to the weakening of the industry, which deepened in the second half of 2024.
Construction activity fell by 7.1% year-on-year in the last month of the year, marking five months of decline, affected by the sharp drop in civil engineering projects.
This last item, which is mainly driven by public investment, plummeted 33.7%, reflecting the sudden drop in the volume of public works, which in 2023 had one of its best years thanks to works such as the Mayan Train, but which in 2024 contracted as the works were completed.
Precisely because of the difficult basis of comparison, this latest decline turned out to be the largest for construction activity since the 38.8% collapse that occurred in November 1995.
Meanwhile, manufacturing, which is the backbone of the country's industrial activity, recorded monthly declines in 14 of the 21 sectors that comprise it in December.
The five largest declines were recorded in transport equipment manufacturing (-6.4%), furniture manufacturing (-4.1%), metal products (-2.3%), non-metallic minerals (-1.7%) and clothing manufacturing (-1.1%).
In annual terms, the manufacturing sub-index decreased by 0.3%, the seventh (non-consecutive) observed in 2024.
Accumulated data
From January to December, industrial activity recorded a slight expansion of 0.2%, mainly thanks to its performance in the first half of the year.
This is the weakest performance for the indicator since the 8.8% contraction observed in the pandemic-hit 2020.
It also reflects a sharp slowdown, as in 2023, growth was 3.4%, thanks to the solid growth in construction activity that year.
From another perspective, industrial activity had an average decline of 1.5% during the last quarter of the year, a figure close to the 1.2% decline in secondary activities estimated by Inegi on January 30 in its Timely Estimate of the Quarterly Gross Domestic Product.
In this, it reported a 0.6% contraction of the country's GDP during the last quarter of last year.
