At least, it's better than the previous month when manufacturing output fell back by 1.9%.
On Tuesday, the government said U.S. producer prices jumped a surprising 1.8% last month and industrial output rose firmly, sparking inflation jitters in financial markets.
Daily output this month, according to the analysts at Mirae Assets Securities, could be as low as 1.85 million tons.
But there was still an increase in the backlog of orders to be completed as power shortages hurt production activity, which could give a further boost to output next month.
Separately, December industrial output in Italy rose 0.4% on the month, but for all of 2012 output was at the lowest level since at least 1990.
Figures released earlier this month by the ONS showed that manufacturing output in January had fallen by 1.5% from the month before.
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has agreed to raise its output slightly this month.
Amplats last month announced plans to cut output by 20% and eliminate 14, 000 jobs, but has postponed this for consultations with the government and unions.
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The workers will be hoping for hefty pay rises, following a 37% rise in wages given by Freeport McMoRan Copper in December 2011 to end a three-month strike that had paralyzed output and lifted copper prices.
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Indeed, because they have little hard economic data for June, they had to use informed guesswork to estimate how much output fell in the month.
The company announced last month that full-year 2012 output was 105, 050 gold-equivalent ounces, with production in 2013 forecast to grow by 24% to 130, 000 gold-equivalent ounces.
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No longer, said Mr Mawampanga: output would be auctioned each month to the highest bidder.
The balance of firms reporting higher output during the three-month period fell to 33% from 38% in September, while the balance of respondents reporting a decline in new orders widened to 17% from 1%.
Over the last twelve-month period ended on September 30, 2012 output reached 317.4 million metric tons.
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Output rose for a sixth consecutive month, expanding by 0.2% in the year to June.
February also saw a decrease in factory output, making it the eighth month in a row this had fallen.
Supply has been an ongoing worry for the market for some time, but was exacerbated last month when Amplats announced plans to close some output, pending negotiations with unions and the government.
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The economy is growing strongly right now, thanks to high oil prices, but this follows a severe recession: the country has yet to recover the output lost in a two-month general strike in 2002-03.
The 12-month rate of growth in Germany's industrial output slowed to only 0.5% in November.
Scotland's overall manufacturing output in October fell for the fourth month in a row, the longest continuous period of decline since the 2008-09 recession.
Even more troubling, manufacturing output was down for a fifth consecutive month in the Eurozone as a whole as well as in France, while in Germany it marked its third consecutive monthly decline.
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February construction output in the euro zone fell on the month, a fourth straight decline.
Meanwhile, industrial output fell in May for the eighth successive month, dropping to a level 2.8% lower than a year earlier.
It also indicated that output and new work picked up for businesses last month.
Output declined 1.9% from the same month last year, after falling 1.6% in September, the National Statistics Institute (INE) said.
Third, industrial value-added output jumped 9.2% over the same month last year.
Output fell by 1.3% from the previous month, and by 4.3% compared to a year earlier, official data showed.
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