Taiwan’s industrial output contracted 3.28 percent year-on-year last month, the biggest decline in 15 months, because of declining output of machinery equipment, cars and car parts, computers, electronics and optical products, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
Last month’s output was 23.79 percent higher than February, when the Lunar New Year holiday shortened the number of working days, the ministry said.
Manufacturing production — which accounts for more than 90 percent of the nation’s total factory output and includes the electronics, chemical, machinery, foodstuffs and textile sectors — declined 3.24 percent year-on-year last month.
In the first quarter, industrial output rose 0.78 percent year-on-year because of an increase in construction activity, but declined 6.1 percent from a quarter ago, the ministry said.
The latest report showed machinery equipment output last month dropped 13.63 percent year-on-year, which was mainly due to increased competition from Japanese companies amid the depreciation of the yen and decreasing global demand.
The output of automobiles and key components for automobiles also declined 9.2 percent from a year earlier as customers waited for prices to decline amid the depreciation of the yen, Yang Kuei-hsien (楊貴顯), deputy director-general of the ministry’s statistics department, told a press conference.
The 7.04 percent year-on-year decline in computers, electronics and optical products last month was mainly due to the reduced output of new smartphones as a result of a shortage of key components, Yang said.
Citing the ministry’s sentiment survey among manufacturers, Yang said the ministry expects industrial output this month to be flat from last month, but to rise slightly compared with a year ago.
As for this quarter, he said industrial output would likely see a quarter-on-quarter increase, but the increase would be mild.
The industrial output data came after the ministry said on Monday that export orders — an indication of shipments for the next one to three months — last month contracted 6.6 percent to US$35.84 billion from US$38.37 billion a year ago, the second consecutive annual decline this year.
Market sentiment has been highly volatile recently, Yang said, adding that the outlook for the second half of this year remained murky.
“For example, the market conditions in the petrochemical and steel industries shifted from positive to gloomy after the Lunar New Year holiday,” Yang said.
On the domestic front, revenue of the wholesale, retail and restaurant sectors was NT$1.18 trillion (US$39.57 billion) last month, down 0.7 percent from a year ago, but 13.7 percent higher than the previous month, the ministry said in a separate report.
Cumulative revenue last quarter amounted to NT$3.44 trillion, up 0.4 percent year-on-year, the data showed.
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
The global server market is expected to grow 12.8 percent annually this year, with artificial intelligence (AI) servers projected to account for 16.5 percent, driven by continued investment in AI infrastructure by major cloud service providers (CSPs), market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. Global AI server shipments this year are expected to increase 28 percent year-on-year to more than 2.7 million units, driven by sustained demand from CSPs and government sovereign cloud projects, TrendForce analyst Frank Kung (龔明德) told the Taipei Times. Demand for GPU-based AI servers, including Nvidia Corp’s GB and Vera Rubin rack systems, is expected to remain high,
RSS