The Commerce Department disclosed on Thursday that there was no considerable change to business inventories in the United States for January. This revelation was unexpected, as preceding December had seen a marginal rise of 0.3%.
Contrary to economists' predictions, business inventories did not experience a 0.2% increase as anticipated. Instead, they compared to the 0.4% growth observed in the prior month.
An assessment of different sectors showed a 0.4% rise in retail inventories. However, this was counterbalanced by a reduction in wholesale inventories by 0.3% and manufacturing inventories by 0.1%.
The report also highlighted that business sales experienced a significant drop of 1.3% in January. This was a stark contrast to the situation in December when sales volume remained stable. A 1.7% decrease was observed in wholesale sales, while both retail and manufacturing sales saw an approximately equal slump of around 1.0% to 1.1%.
Given these figures, the overall ratio of business inventories to sales slightly increased to 1.39 in January, up from 1.38 in December.
