Overall Australian Investments Head South, Mining Swings Further North
There is no stopping Australia's resources boom and it appears that investors are racing to cash-in on the surging profits projected to be reap from mining activities, according to the latest figures issued on Friday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Much of the action is concentrated on Western Australia's Pilbara region and Queensland, where many companies are pouring down their cash, which according to ABS are investing as much as $120 million each day on the region.
That economic activity alone, ABS said, represents a big heap of Australia's economic expansion in the past six months as mining firms ramped up their capital expenditures during the first half of 2011 despite initial setbacks brought by extreme weather condition and flooding from late 2010 through the first three months of the current year.
From April to June this year, the new ABS report showed that mining investments soared by 14.4 percent while acquisitions of fresh equipments and machineries went up by 22 percent and indications are pointing to likely spending surges in the months and quarters ahead.
The ABS said that all numbers in the mining sector have so far registered northern directions as improvements were further seen on the 12 percent expenditure budget during the first three months of 2011.
To put into perspective the compelling impact of mining investments to the general Australian economy, the ABS said overall investment actually retreated by 5.6 percent if new investments seen in Queensland and WA were to be excluded.
As already flagged by the government and business leaders, the manufacturing sector saw moderate investment activities of only 3.7 percent as compared to the high-octane spending by the resource industry, which many companies said were used up for new buildings, machinery and engineering equipments.
It also appears that Australia's economy will be mostly fuelled by the mining sector as the new ABS data showed that other sectors of the economy saw either stalling or retreating investment decision.
The trend, experts said, can be attributed to the rising Australian dollar, which proved to be both short-term and long-term bane to key industries such as export, manufacturing and even the country's tourism sector.
Also, caught up in the seemingly wholesale declines, which so far has only spared the mining companies, are the food processing and retail industries, with both registering investment slips of 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent respectively in the past 12 months leading to July.