The nation’s export orders last month experienced their smallest year-on-year drop since November, propelled by the Chinese government’s stimulus policy for electronics in rural areas, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
Export orders totaled US$25.13 billion last month, up 5 percent from March, but down 20.90 percent year-on-year. In the first four months of the year, orders dropped 27.36 percent to US$86.86 billion from a year earlier, the ministry’s latest data showed.
“We are seeing smaller and smaller year-on-year declines driven primarily by orders from China benefiting product groups such as digital electronics, information and telecommunication products, as well as precision instruments,” Statistics Department Director Huang Ji-shih (黃吉實) told reporters yesterday.
The Statistics Department is also adopting a new outlook consensus measure called “movement of export order index” starting this month to gauge industry views on the following month.
“An export order index is a number from zero to 100, zero being the worst case scenario, while 100 represents the best case. For the month of May, the calculation shows 64.02 indicating that local leading companies are quite optimistic May export numbers will be even better than those in April,” Huang said.
Huang was cautious to avoid using the word “recovery” in his briefing.
The nation’s two largest export destinations, China and the US, came in at US$6.98 billion and US$5.73 billion last month, registering monthly increases of 13.7 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.
However, export orders to the two countries experienced yearly declines of 14.30 percent and 22.31 percent, respectively, ministry statistics showed.
Additionally, orders to Europe last month saw a decrease of 2.2 percent from March to US$4.37 billion, while orders to Japan last month experienced an increase of 20.4 percent to US$2.48 billion.
Among major export categories, orders for digital products fell 14.76 percent year-on-year to US$6.10 billion, telecoms products decreased 16.26 percent to US$5.94 billion and precision instruments dropped 27.12 percent to US$2.08 billion.
Meanwhile, the ministry said that industrial output also fared better last month, returning to the level six of months ago, increasing 7.17 percent from the previous month, but declining 19.88 percent year-on-year, it said.
Although export order and industrial output both came in better-than-expected, Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), chief economist at Citigroup Taiwan Inc yesterday told the Taipei Times that Citi is reiterating its viewpoint that global conditions would likely return to normal levels in the fourth quarter of this year or the first quarter of next year
In fact, the global financial services firm has revised downward its full-year Taiwan GDP forecast from a 3.2 percent decline to 4.4 percent decline since last month, Cheng said.
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