Angola improves growth by 3.8% this year - Fitch Solutions

Luanda – Consulting firm Fitch Solutions predicts that Angola’s real Gross Domestic Product will accelerate from an estimated 0.6% in 2021 to 3.8% in 2022”

"We predict that Angola's real GDP will accelerate from an estimated 0.6% in 2021 to 3.8% in 2022", states a note, quoted by the Lusa agency as saying.

In the note sent to investors, Fitch Solutions highlights Angola's GDP growth above the consensus forecast of Bloomberg analysts, which points to 2.2% in 2022” and better than the consultancy's January forecast, which foresaw expansion of 2.7%.

Analysts at the consultancy Ficth Solutions, a company owned by the same owners of the financial rating agency Fitch Ratings, write, in the revision of the forecast, that “the price of oil will rise from an average of 71 dollars per barrel, in 2021, to 100 dollars this year.

The move will encourage the companies to increase oil production, which is expected to grow by 3.5% this year”.

Oil represents 85.4% of Angola's exports, the rise in price will be positive for public accounts, which will also be helped “by the strengthening of the Kwanza - Angola's currency, in a context of improving trade conditions and reducing inflation at 25.7% in 2021 to 20% this year.”

In the last quarter of 2021, Ficth Solutions had revised downwards the forecast for the evolution of the Angolan economy, predicting a 1.5% recession for this year, and estimated that the country would return to growth only in 2022.

This year, if the country did not experience growth, it would complete the sixth consecutive recession.

In the first week of April (2022), the consultancy Oxford Economics Africa considered that Angola would grow 3% this year, after five years of recession, with oil production growing 5.4%, to 1.18 million euros of barrels per day.

Still, in April, the company specialised in oil information, Petro-Angola, announced that oil production in the country reached, in March of this year (2022), a total volume of 35.4 million barrels per day, representing an increase of 9.5% in relation to the previous period.

Average daily production in March was set at 1.1 million barrels, according to the monthly report published by Petro-Angola, an Angolan company that provides information on oil, gas and renewable energy.

In the General State Budget (OGE) for this year, approved in December, the Government foresees an expansion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 2.4 percent, explained by the prospects of expansion of non-oil GDP and oil GDP of 3 .1 and 1.6 percent, respectively.

The OGE 2022 sets the price of a barrel of oil at 59 US dollars.