The Mining halted its expansion process in May and recorded declines in activity both in monthly and year-on-year terms. Even so, the sector remains one of the few that has seen growth in 2024 compared to 2023.
The deep recession that Argentina has been experiencing since Javier Milei took office has affected almost all sectors of the economy, with the exception of agriculture, fishing, energy and mining.
However, the latter was added in the fifth month of the year to the sectors affected by the collapse of economic activity since the INDEC’s Mining Industrial Production Index fell 0.2% compared to April and thus recorded its second monthly decline in the last seven months.
In addition, compared to May of last year, there was an increase of 7.7%. However, it is worth clarifying that this improvement was mainly driven by oil and gas production, which are more closely related to the energy sector than to the mining sector, even though they are grouped together in the same category.
Within the mining sector, Metalliferous minerals showed a year-on-year drop of 6.4%. For the extraction of precious metals (gold and silver), which represents the most important division, the decrease was 1.7%. In parallel, Non-metallic minerals suffered their first decline since November 2022, falling 3.1%.
Limestone and gypsum extraction, which is the division with the greatest weight within this segment, suffered a year-on-year collapse of 55.4%. Similarly, the second most important group, which is the extraction of sand, pebbles and crushed stone, contracted by 9.2%.
It should be noted that both categories are closely linked to the dynamics of construction, the precise data for which for May will be released this Friday by INDEC.
Source: Ambito
