Capital Expenditure QoQ

Capital Expenditure QoQ is the quarterly change in private new capital expenditure (spending on long-lived physical assets) in Australia. It comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics quarterly Survey of New Capital Expenditure of about 10,000 business units across 17 selected industries (ANZSIC 2006). The QoQ figure is the headline movement in total new spending in seasonally adjusted (regular seasonal patterns removed) chain-volume (inflation-adjusted volume) terms. It excludes public bodies, agriculture, public administration, superannuation funds, households, used assets, land and speculative projects.

Firms report actual spending plus short and longer term expectations over the 8 or 9 weeks after quarter-end. The release follows about 2 months after quarter-end at 11:30am Sydney time, with actuals by asset, industry and state in current-price and chain-volume forms. Each issue shows original, seasonally adjusted and trend versions, plus expected spending, financial-year estimates, realisation ratios (actual divided by expected) and a media release. First-published figures are preliminary and revised next issue, with seasonal factors re-estimated each quarter and reference levels reset each September issue without changing growth.

No fixed weights exist, so totals reflect summed industry responses rather than preset shares.

• Buildings and structures: captures industrial and commercial buildings, homes, roads, bridges, pipelines, power lines and mine development.
• Equipment, plant and machinery: captures plant, machinery, vehicles, office gear and first-time imports, even if used abroad before.
• Mining vs non-mining: shows the headline industry split published every quarter.
• Selected industries and states: breaks down actual spending across 17 industries and states, with state expectations only in December quarters.
• Expected expenditure and realisation ratios: tracks financial-year spending plans, adjusted for past gaps between expected and actual amounts.

The December quarter of 2023 (published February 29, 2024) showed spending up 0.8% to $40,061m, 7.9% higher than a year earlier, with trend at 0.9%. Buildings and structures rose 1.5% to $21,712m, but equipment, plant and machinery fell 0.1% to $18,349m, so the headline hid a split. Mining rose 1.1% and non-mining rose 0.6%, with electricity, gas, water and waste up 14.7% on renewable energy infrastructure. Estimate 1 for 2024-25 was $145.6b, 12.6% above Estimate 1 for 2023-24, showing why both asset splits always matter.

1. Collect reports: Firms report actual and expected spending on new tangible assets from management accounts (internal business records) through an online survey.
2. Edit, impute and expand: Responses are checked, missing units are imputed (estimated), then number-raised estimation (grossing sample values to population totals) builds current-price totals. A coverage adjustment of about 0.5% to 0.6% covers register gaps.
3. Convert to chain-volume terms: Yearly price weights turn current-price data into inflation-adjusted volumes, chain-linked onto a reference-year level.
4. Adjust for seasonality and trend: Seasonal factors are re-estimated each quarter with ARIMA modelling (a projection method). Trend is a 7-term Henderson moving average (a smoothing formula).
5. Adjust expectations: Divide later actual spending by earlier expected spending to get realisation ratios, then multiply new expectations by historical ratios before comparing with actuals.
6. Compute QoQ change: Divide the change in seasonally adjusted real total by the prior quarter total and multiply by 100, with sampling-error bands published. For example, $2,352.9m compared with $2,300.0m gives about 2.3%.