Australia Business Confidence

Last Release

Nov 30, 2024

Actual

-3

Units In

Points

Frequency

Monthly

Next Release

Jan 23, 2025

Time to Release

1 Months 11 Days 0 Hours

Highest	Lowest	Average	Date Range	Source
23 Apr 2021	-66 Mar 2020	4.88 Points	1997-2024	National Australia Bank

The NAB monthly survey of business confidence is based on a telephone survey of around 600 small, medium and large size non-agricultural companies. The Survey measures the expectations of business conditions for the upcoming month and is a simple average of trading, profitability and employment indices, reported by respondents for their company. The indices are calculated by taking the difference between the percentage of respondents nominating good or very good, or a rise and those nominating poor or very poor, or a fall.

Latest Updates

Australia’s NAB business confidence index plunged to -3 in November 2024 from a near two-year top of 5 in the prior month, falling below its long-term average due to declines across most industries, except for construction. Meanwhile, business conditions sank to their lowest since late 2020 (2 vs 7 in October), with all sub-components now at or below average: sales (8 vs 13), profitability (5 vs -1), and employment (2 vs 3). Activity shrank across all industries, with retail and manufacturing seeing the worst conditions. Labor cost growth in quarterly terms was unchanged (at 1.4%) while purchase cost growth ticked up to 1.1%. Product price growth stayed at 0.6%, with retail price growth slowing (0.6% vs 1.1%). Forward orders fell further (-5 vs -3). Capex rose slightly (10 vs 8), amid stable capacity utilization at 82.4%. "The survey points to ongoing soft growth in Q4... it will likely take more time for price pressures to normalize fully," said NAB chief economist Alan Oster.