December key figures
| Sep Qtr 19 to Dec Qtr 19 (%) | Dec Qtr 18 to Dec Qtr 19 (%) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales of goods and services (Chain volume measures) | ||||
| Manufacturing | ||||
| Trend | 0.3 | -1.3 | ||
| Seasonally Adjusted | 1.0 | -1.0 | ||
| Wholesale trade | ||||
| Trend | -0.6 | -1.3 | ||
| Seasonally Adjusted | -0.4 | -0.9 | ||
| Inventories (Chain volume measures) | ||||
| Trend | -0.2 | -0.8 | ||
| Seasonally Adjusted | 0.3 | -0.2 | ||
| Company gross operating profits | ||||
| Trend | -0.9 | 4.6 | ||
| Seasonally Adjusted | -3.5 | 2.3 | ||
| Wages and salaries | ||||
| Seasonally Adjusted | 1.0 | 5.0 |
December key points
Chain volume estimates
- The trend estimate for inventories fell 0.2% in the December quarter 2019. The seasonally adjusted estimate rose 0.3% this quarter.
- The trend estimate for Manufacturing sales of goods and services rose 0.3% this quarter. The seasonally adjusted estimate rose 1.0% this quarter.
- The trend estimate for Wholesale trade sales of goods and services fell 0.6% this quarter. The seasonally adjusted estimate fell 0.4%.
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Current prices estimates
- The seasonally adjusted estimate for company gross operating profits fell 3.5% in the December quarter 2019.
- The seasonally adjusted estimate for wages and salaries rose 1.0% in the December quarter 2019.
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Comparison between company gross operating profits and gross operating surplus
Valuation changes have had an impact on the value of inventories held by Australian businesses this quarter. An inventories valuation adjustment (IVA) is applied in the calculation of the gross operating surplus of private non-financial corporations (GOS) estimate in the Australian National Accounts. The IVA for the December quarter 2019 is -$1,097m, which is $1,676m lower than the September quarter 2019 IVA of $579m.
No adjustment is made to the company gross operating profits (CGOP) estimate in this publication and, as a result, users should exercise caution when comparing CGOP and GOS. It should be noted that there are other differences between the two series. In particular, changes are made to GOS when annual benchmarks are applied and slightly different seasonal factors apply to the two series. Given this, while CGOP movements are an appropriate indicator for GOS, the two series will not have equivalent seasonally adjusted movements from quarter to quarter.
Bushfires in December and January
Bushfires resulted in only minor disruption to data collection activities during January 2020 in New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. Quality assurance undertaken by the ABS confirmed that these disruptions to data collection did not result in any significant impact to the quality of December Business Indicators statistics. Whilst some individual businesses did report some negative impacts from bushfires in New South Wales in December the impacts were not apparent at the aggregate level.