Euro zone July industrial output rose 0.4 per cent from the previous month and 2.4 per cent from a year earlier as the output of durable consumer goods posted its biggest rise in a year, Eurostat said today.
The strongest increases in individual member states were recorded in Ireland with 13.5 per cent and Estonia 3.4 per cent.
The monthly increase in production for the Euro zone as a whole was smaller than the consensus forecast of 0.6 per cent but the year-on-year rise surpassed economists' expectations of a two per cent gain.
This was partly due to changes to June data, which Eurostat revised to show that output fell 0.2 per cent on a monthly basis and climbed 3.0 per cent year-on-year.
The European Union statistics office had previously estimated the monthly drop at 0.4 per cent and the annual increase at 2.7 per cent.
One bright spot was a strong increase in the output of durable consumer goods, which rose 1.7 per cent from the previous month, their biggest increase since July 2003.
Still, that followed a decline of 1.1 per cent in June and a Eurostat official warned against reading too much into the volatile series. The production of such goods rose 1.6 per cent from a year earlier.
