Rio de Janeiro – Oil refinement ranked first in the list of five main industrial activities in Brazil in 2006, with a production of 107.14 billion reals (US$ 66.7 billion) and sales of 99.53 billion reals (US$ 62 billion). Next comes automobile, light truck and utilitarian vehicle manufacturing activities; iron ore extraction, slaughtering of animals and preparation of meat products, and production of steel laminates. The data were culled from the Annual Industrial Survey-Product (PIA-Produto), disclosed today (25th) by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Production and sales by the automobile industry in 2006 stood at 68.30 billion reals (US$ 42.5 billion) and 55.74 billion reals (US$ 34.7 billion), respectively. Extraction of iron ore reached 34.63 billion reals (US$ 21.5 billion) and 26.16 billion reals (US$ 16.3 billion). The animal slaughtering sector generated 30.16 billion reals (US$ 18.7 billion) in production and 24.38 billion reals (US$ 14.6 billion) in sales; and the figures for the laminated aluminium sector stood at 23.04 billion reals (US$ 14.3 billion) and 23.39 billion reals (US$ 14.5 billion).
Also with regard to production value, the list of the ten leading industrial activities developed in 2006 includes sugar plants (20.83 billion reals or US$ 12.9 billion), thermoplastic resins manufacturing (19.62 billion reals or US$ 12.2 billion), production of medication for human use (19.24 billion reals or US$ 11.9 billion), manufacturing of lorries and buses (18.65 billion reals or US$ 11.6 billion) and aluminium manufacturing (18.09 billion reals or US$ 11.2 billion).
The survey universe was comprised of 34,500 companies with 43,000 local units, i.e., industrial plants. In all, 3,500 products were surveyed, with sales totalling 1.117 trillion reals (US$ 696.1 billion) in 2006, the equivalent to 90% of industrial sales in the country. The manager at the survey, João Batista de Oliveira, explained that the universe of PIA-Produto only includes companies with at least 30 employees.
According to João Batista, in the list of leading states for sales of industrial products and/or services "the state of São Paulo still ranks first. Of those US$ 696.1 billion, São Paulo answered to 41.5% in sales in 2006." Next come the states of Minas Gerais (10.4%); Rio Grande do Sul (8%), Paraná and Rio de Janeiro (7.3% each), Bahia (5.2%), Amazonas (4.3%), Santa Catarina (3.9%) and Espírito Santo (2.3%). "We take under consideration the states whose participation was greater than 2%," explained the researcher at the IBGE.
The fact that a large number of industries are located in São Paulo explains, to a large extent, the concentration of sales in the state, as the manager at PIA-Produto explains. "São Paulo earns one of the largest pieces of the pie due to its economical situation. There are industries throughout the entire territory in the state."
The IBGE is already collecting information for the 2007 PIA-Produto survey, stated João Batista.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
