Lasha Kavtaradze, economist at investment bank Galt & Taggart, said that 11% economic growth in January was due to the reduced activity in the previous months, which was carried over into January. As of him, this fact increased the turnover of VAT-paying enterprises.
According to preliminary data from Geostat, real GDP growth accelerated to 11.1% in January 2025, after a 6.7% increase recorded in the previous month. This growth was mainly driven by the professional and scientific, transport, construction, information and communication, manufacturing and trade sectors. In addition, a decrease was recorded in the mining industry.
"We know that in November-December the economic growth rate slowed down significantly. It fell below double digits and was 6.7% in December. To some extent, the accumulated demand was already transferred in January and was realized there. This is the only possible explanation, although we will see this later when Geostat publishes the components of the gross domestic product.
Here we should consider the fundamental macro factors that affect economic activity. We should look at the export of goods, what are the foreign exchange inflows from other channels, the export of goods increased by 19% in January, which is a relatively high growth. Remittances were reduced, although remittances from Russia were normalized. As for tourism revenues, we look at the statistics of payments with foreign cards, they increased by a small 1.4% to 250. If we sum up all this and take into account the imports, as well as our shipments abroad, in January of this year compared to January of the previous year, and if we also exclude the one-time import of paintings from imports, taking this into account, the improvement is approximately 5%," Kavtaradze said on BMGTV.
