The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) expanded for a 16th consecutive month to reach 57.6 last month, although growth has decelerated since peaking at 58.7 in December last year, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER,中華經濟研究院) said yesterday.
The economic barometer gauges the health of the local manufacturing industry, with scores above 50 indicating an expansion and those below representing a contraction.
“The latest PMI figures indicate that industry sentiment continued to improve, but at a slower pace,” CIER president Wu Chung-shu (吳中書) told a news conference in Taipei.
The nation’s four major manufacturing industries — basic materials, transportation, electrical and mechanical, and electronics and optics — all recorded expansions last month, statistics showed.
However, the food and textiles industry, and the chemicals, biotechnology and medical industry dropped to 47.6 points and 49.6 points respectively.
The decline in the two sectors could be attributed to the slow season, the Taipei-based think tank said in its monthly report.
The PMI’s five sub-indices — new orders, production, employment, inventories and supplier deliveries — all trended up last month, the report showed.
New orders climbed to 58.3 points last month from May’s 57.3 points, with orders for electronics and optical devices — the two main pillars of the nation’s economy — reaching 64.2 points last month, the survey found.
Taiwanese manufacturers expressed optimism about their business prospects in the second half compared with the first half, according to a survey released twice-yearly by CIER.
“Despite optimistic forecasts, local companies still have concerns about several economic uncertainties,” Wu said, citing the sharp appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar and rising labor costs due to new labor regulations.
The non-manufacturing index (NMI) also remained above the 50-point threshold, although the index slid to 52.7 points from May’s 54.8 points, the institute said in a separate report.
Education service providers reported the worst decline in business, followed by transportation service providers, the NMI survey showed.
Service-oriented firms are generally optimistic about market sentiment in the coming six months, with the exception of companies in the catering and construction industries, the institute said.
The sub-index on the six-month outlook remained in positive territory at 51.5 points, marking its fifth consecutive month of expansion, the report showed.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS