Cement and clinker imports fell 25% in August, while about 6,300 new businesses registered

A building permit tells you what somebody intends. Cement arriving at the border tells you what is being poured. The gap between the two can be a year or more, and it is the gap in which projects quietly stop. On the August figures, construction material imports were down around 12% year on year and cement and clinker imports down 25%, while construction itself fell, with the decline concentrated in civil engineering: roads, bridges, motorways and tunnels. If you are a buyer looking at an unfinished building and wondering whether it will be delivered, the national materials line is the cheapest sanity check available.

The growth came from manufacturing, driven by refined petroleum products including fuel oil, naphtha and gas oil; from information and communication, meaning software development and IT services; from financial and insurance activity on higher net interest income at the banks; from trade and from transport and storage, both linked to foreign trade. Real estate also grew, and the report attributes that specifically to land transactions and non-residential leasing rather than to apartment sales. That is a useful distinction, because it means the sector's contribution this August came from the commercial and land side rather than from the residential market that most owners are exposed to.

New business registrations rose 35% to nearly 6,300 in the month, and turnover among VAT-registered businesses rose 12% to more than 16.85 billion lari. Registrations are an imperfect indicator, because a registration is a form rather than a trading company and many never trade at all, but a 35% jump in one month is large enough to be worth noting. For anyone letting commercial space or small offices, this is the demand side of the equation: the report has non-residential leasing growing at the same time as thousands of new entities appear on the register.

Exports rose about 24.7% in the month and imports 4.3%, with petroleum product exports up roughly elevenfold year on year. An elevenfold increase in one export category is not a sign of broad economic strength; it is a sign of refining and re-export volumes moving through the country, which lift the trade figures and the manufacturing line without necessarily lifting incomes or demand for housing. The 6.3% headline is real, and the eight-month average of 7.6% is a strong year by any standard, but a reader deciding whether to buy here should look at what is inside the number rather than at the number itself.