Germany's November Industrial Output Beats Expectations -- Update

Data released Tuesday suggest that Germany's economy may have performed even better than expected in the recently completed year, and will continue on a strong growth path in the current year, analysts say.

Industrial output data, released Tuesday by the country's statistics office, showed factory output growing by 3.4% on month in adjusted terms. Forecasters polled by The Wall Street Journal had predicted an increase of 1.9%.

"The good development of new orders as well as optimistic business expectations point to a brisk development of the industrial economy," said the country's Economics Ministry in a press release.

Private sector economists were also optimistic. "German GDP looks set to have risen by slightly more than our above-consensus forecast of 2.5% in 2017, and we expect a similarly strong pace of growth this year," said Jennifer McKeown of Capital Economics in a note Tuesday.

"It looks very likely that the German economy has had its best performance since 2011 and there is currently very little reason to believe that the strong performance could end any time soon," said ING economist Carsten Brzeski.

Germany's statistics office is due to make a preliminary estimate of 2017 economic output on Thursday. Polled experts expect growth of 2.3%.

The country's statistics office also reported Tuesday that Germany's adjusted trade balance stood at 22.3 billion euros ($26.7 billion) in November. Exports grew by 4.1% on the month while imports increased 2.3%. Polled economists had expected November's figure to be EUR21 billion.

Write to Todd Buell at todd.buell@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 09, 2018 03:24 ET (08:24 GMT)