FRANKFURT (AFX) - The European Central Bank said the recent strong recovery in euro zone business sentiment now reflects real economic conditions, and not just expectations. Previously the ECB had said that the improvement in business sentiment was not yet reflected in real activity data. In its March monthly bulletin, the ECB highlighted the improvement in industrialists' assessment of order books in the February European Commission business survey. This was the first time that this assessment has improved after a protracted period of deterioration, it said. "This suggests that the recent improvement in business sentiment now also reflects actual conditions as well as expectations," it said. The ECB said indications of a recovery in the euro zone industrial sector are still mainly confined to survey data, but such surveys have a solid track record in predicting actual activity trends. "The coincident and stable relationship between business confidence and production in manufacturing suggests that the signs of a turning point in confidence around the turn of the year also point to a possible recovery in production growth," it said. The results of various business surveys point to a marked improvement in confidence in January and February, with the cumulative increase in the euro zone purchasing managers' index over this period unprecedented in the short history of the PMI survey, it said. This points to a turning point in the rate of growth in manufacturing production, it said. Indicators of activity in the consumer sector are generally more volatile than those for the industrial sector, and consumer data do not yet give any clear signals on trends at the turn of the year, the ECB said. "The pattern of consumer confidence observed around the turn of the year does not...provide clear indications that the decline in consumer confidence could have reached a trough," it said.