Private-sector machinery orders in Japan, excluding volatile orders for ships and from power companies, fell 4.9 percent in March from February after seasonal adjustment, marking their third consecutive month of decline, the Economic Planning Agency said Friday.
For the January-March quarter, however, the orders expanded 4.9 percent from the previous three months, registering their third straight quarterly increase.
Looking ahead, the EPA projects that core private-sector orders will fall 1 percent in the April-June quarter from the previous three months.
Commenting on the results and the forecast, Yoshihiko Senoo, chief of the agency's Business Statistics Research Division, told reporters that "a recovery is observed continuously in the basic trend of machinery orders."
He noted that although March saw a third consecutive monthly drop in orders, the declines in the previous two months were relatively small, at 0.3 percent for January and 0.5 percent for February, and that the rates of decline were a result of the strong 11.7 percent jump in orders in December. He said the March orders, at 910.6 billion yen, were still at a relatively high level, up 6.7 percent from March 1999.
For the April-June period, the orders are unlikely to come sharply under the predicted 1 percent decline.