The production value of the nation’s manufacturing sector last year climbed 5.85 percent year-on-year to NT$13.03 trillion (US$445.77 billion), ending two years of annual decline, driven mainly by a strong electronics components industry, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
“The performance marked the second-highest production value of the manufacturing sector since we started compiling the data in 1953,” Department of Statistics Deputy Director-General Wang Shu-chuan (王淑娟) said by telephone.
The record high was in 2011, when the manufacturing sector reached NT$14.66 trillion in production value, department data showed.
The production value of the electronics components industry, which accounted for 28.16 percent of total manufacturing output, last year gained 3.54 percent to NT$3.67 trillion, supported by the production of semiconductors and flat panels, Wang said.
Robust demand for chips used in smartphones, automotive electronics, graphics processing units and high-performance computers drove semiconductor output, she said.
Growing demand for crytocurrency mining also supported semiconductor demand last year, she added.
Production of chemicals and basic metals both grew more than 10 percent last year, while machinery equipments expanded 8.41 percent annually, thanks to a recovering global economy, Wang said.
Computer electronics and optoelectronics components output last year fell 5.55 percent annually, due to persisted weakness of a Taiwanese smartphone vendor’s handsets and its virtual-reality (VR) headset, she said.
She declined to identify the company, but HTC Corp (宏達電) is the only Taiwanese vendor that has a manufacturing facility for smartphones and VR products in the nation.
The production value of flat panels last year enjoyed an annual increase of 14.01 percent, but the growth momentum slowed down in the final two quarters of the year amid declining average selling prices of large LCD panels, Wang said.
Last quarter, the production value of flat panels contracted by 5.63 percent annually, ending three quarters of annual expansion, she said.
While large LCD panels used in TVs faced pricing pressure last quarter, the average selling prices of mid-sized and small LCD panels for smartphones and automotive screens remained stable, she added.
The overall production value of the manufacturing sector last quarter rose 4.06 percent annually to NT$3.39 trillion, ministry data showed.
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