Mumbai, March 3 -- The latest HCOB PMI survey showed that while manufacturing business conditions continued to deteriorate across Germany in February, they did so at the slowest rate for more than two years.
Output, new orders and export sales all posted only modest declines, while firms' purchasing activity and backlogs of work also fell more slowly.
Employment, on the other hand, decreased sharply, with the rate of job shedding even accelerating from the month before. February also saw slightly faster declines in both input costs and output prices as spare capacity across supply chains prompted discounting by vendors.
Looking ahead, goods producers in the eurozone's largest economy predicted that output levels would rise over the comin...