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Japan Nov machinery orders unexpectedly strong-EPA

TOKYO: Japan's November core private sector machinery orders came in stronger than the Economic Planning Agency (EPA) had expected, an EPA official said on Monday.

The EPA earlier said Japan's core private-sector machinery orders, excluding orders for machinery at electric power companies and for ships, fell a seasonally adjusted 2.2 percent in November from the previous month."The 2.2 percent month-on-month decline was a stronger performance than we had expected," said Yoshihiko Seno of the EPA's statistics division. "It would not have been surprising for the figure to have fallen as much as eight percent in reaction to the accumulated gains of the past few months."

He said the EPA upgraded its assessment of private-sector machinery orders, saying they have generally stopped falling.

In the previous two months, the EPA said it had detected movement toward a bottoming out in private-sector machinery orders, which are widely regarded as a leading indicator by about six months of corporate capital spending on plant and equipment.-Reuters