Industry Financing Cost Methodology
ECB lending-rate proxy, Swiss SNB investment-loan treatment, eurozone aggregation, and interpretation limits for furniture production financing-cost analysis.
What the indicator measures
The indicator is designed to represent the financing-cost component of broader furniture production overheads. It is not a direct NACE C31 furniture-manufacturing borrowing rate. Instead, it uses harmonised lending-rate statistics for non-financial corporations as the most consistent public proxy for the financing conditions faced by industrial producers.
Country rows
For EU and euro-area countries, Furnilytics uses the ECB MFI interest-rate statistics series for new loans to non-financial corporations, excluding revolving loans and overdrafts, with total initial rate fixation and total amount. Euro-area countries are reported in euro. Non-euro EU countries use the transaction-currency series where available.
Switzerland is not covered by ECB MIR. The Swiss row therefore uses the Swiss National Bank Data Portal cube
zikredlauf, filtered to fixed-rate investment loans and the mean interest rate. Because the SNB
reports separate maturity buckets, Furnilytics selects, for each month, the maturity bucket with the largest
number of loan agreements and records that selected bucket in the source detail.
Aggregates
The dataset keeps the official ECB euro-area aggregate separate from the Furnilytics EUROZONE row.
The Furnilytics row is a production-weighted average of available euro-area country rates using furniture
production turnover weights. It should be read as an analytical furniture-sector aggregate, not as an official
ECB series.
Interpretation
The series is useful for tracking financing-cost pressure over time and comparing broad country conditions. It should not be interpreted as the exact borrowing rate paid by a specific furniture manufacturer. Differences in loan mix, customer quality, lender mix, currency, maturity, and national reporting conventions can affect the level of each country row, especially when comparing Switzerland with ECB-based countries.