The nation’s industrial output last month surged 10.64 percent year-on-year, the seventh straight month of annual expansion, on robust demand for electronics, machinery products and basic metals, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
“The growth momentum reflected a recovering global economy, although a relatively low base of comparison last year also helped,” Department of Statistics Deputy Director-General Wang Shu-chuan (王淑娟) told a news conference.
In the first two months of this year, industrial production rose 6.22 percent annually, with manufacturing output, which accounts for more than 90 percent of industrial production, growing 8.27 percent, the data showed.
Semiconductor output, which jumped 31.57 percent year-on-year in the two-month period, was the main contributor to manufacturing output growth, Wang said, adding that an annual increase of 10.99 percent in production of large flat panels also lent support.
Improving global demand prompted investment in industrial automation and enabled the production of machinery goods to rise by 8.53 percent in the two-month period from a year ago, Wang said.
However, computer electronics and optical device output shrank 3.05 percent annually, dragged down by a local smartphone vendor’s declining shipments, which offset the production growth of camera lenses used in international brands’ smartphones, she said
The ministry forecast that manufacturing output would climb only 1 percent year-on-year this month, as many large petrochemical manufacturers are expected to carry out routine annual inspections, Wang said.
The production of electronics will also slow down this month, due to the traditional slow season for consumer electronics, she added.
Separately yesterday, the ministry released the latest statistics on the nation’s commercial sales, which showed that wholesale sector revenue last month rose 14.3 percent year-on-year to NT$698.5 billion (US$22.9 billion) due to demand for flat panels, servers and memory products such as DRAM.
That brought the sector’s cumulative sales to NT$1.5 trillion in the first two months of the year, the ministry said.
However, revenue from the retail sector last month contracted for the first time in eight years, which Wang attributed to disappointing sales of winter clothes due to warm weather and a government subsidy program for home appliances that lifted last year’s base of comparison.
Retail-sector revenue last month declined 8.4 percent annually to NT$302.6 billion and fell 1.7 percent year-on-year to NT$681.6 billion in the two-month period, the ministry said.
Restaurant and beverage sector revenue last month fell 8.4 percent annually to NT$36.5 billion, with cumulative sales in the first two months expanding 2.9 percent to NT$79.6 billion, Wang said.
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