The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released the August
Manufacturing Survey showing things didn’t change much in Oklahoma and the other 7 states or parts of them that make up the Tenth District.
Cortney Cowley, assistant vice president and Oklahoma City Branch executive said expectations for future activity remained expansionary.
“Regional factory activity continued to edge up slightly in August, and expectations for future activity remained positive,” said Cowley. “Volume of shipments and new orders increased
modestly, while production and employment remained relatively flat.”
This month, contacts were asked special questions about changes in purchasing activity and product demand expectations. Approximately 36% of firms reported customers’ purchase
volumes decreased slightly compared to last quarter, 9% reported a significant decrease, 17% reported no change, 34% reported a slight increase, and 3% reported a significant increase in purchase volumes.
Compared to last quarter, over a third (34%) of firms reported customer purchases/services decreased slightly, 13% reported a significant decrease, 27% reported no change, 24% reported a slight increase, and 2% reported they increased significantly.
For the remainder of 2025, almost half of firms (46%) expect demand for their products will be slightly higher than the prior quarter and 2% expect it will be significantly higher, 18% expect no change, while 22% expect it will be slightly lower, and 12% expect it will be significantly lower.
Selected Manufacturing Comments
| FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF KANSAS CITY
“Business is better, although many of the things affecting us are singular opportunities to our capabilities and are not indicative of a broad-based improvement in the industrial economy. Agricultural and automotive products are still weak.”
“Uncertainty has been the most heard word to describe our machine manufacturing industry.”
“We will increase head count this quarter by 10 employees. Next quarter we will add 5 additional heads.”
“Taking much longer to be paid.”
“Demand is very sporadic. Some customer demand is up and some is down. There is no consistency or ability to easily predict. We deal with food, and overall retail demand on the discount side is higher than traditional. However, we are seeing a slight uptick across the board as it seems more people are eating at home. There is also softness in markets that deal with the food service, but this is a small part of our business.”
“Supply of raw material is down significantly YTD. If we had more supply, we could easily sell more at current higher prices.”
“There’s just an overall slight drop off in orders for our products and the people who are ordering are being very cautious not to carry too much inventory.”
“Business has been very slow YTD.”
The bank serves the Tenth Federal Reserve District encompassing the western third of Missouri; all of Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Wyoming and the northern half of New Mexico.