Sales generated by the nation’s wholesale sector increased 4.8 percent on an annual basis last month to NT$883.2 billion (US$29.41 billion), ending four consecutive months of annual declines, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ statistics department said on Wednesday.
The sector has mainly the machinery equipment industry to thank for its recovery, as it posted a 6.5 percent year-on-year increase in sales last month to NT$330.4 billion, contributing around 37.41 percent of the sector’s overall revenue.
“Companies have reported strong orders of mobile phones and other network communication devices for last month,” Department of Statistics Deputy Director-General Wang Shu-chuan (王淑娟) told a press conference on Wednesday in Taipei, adding that domestic investments from the semiconductor sector have also been partly responsible for the industry’s growth.
As the Lunar New Year falls on an earlier date this year, the food, beverage and tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry, and the household appliances industry all witnessed rosy sales last month, increasing 7.7 percent, 10.6 percent and 8.9 percent year-on-year respectively, the ministry’s data showed.
“We also saw a strong performance from the automotive industry last month, which posted an 8.7 percent year-on-year increase in sales,” Wang said, citing growing sales of commercial vehicles as well as the popularity of newly launched car models as the main reasons.
The construction materials industry, the wholesale sector’s second-largest contributor, continued to suffer from weak market demand as it posted a 1.7 percent year-on-year decline in sales last month to NT$104.9 billion, but the figure was its best for last year, Wang said.
Overall revenue totaled NT$10.25 trillion for the wholesale sector last year, decreasing 2.1 percent from NT$10.47 trillion in 2018, the ministry’s data indicated.
Meanwhile, the nation’s retail sector reported a 2.7 percent year-on-year increase in sales last month to NT$350.3 billion.
Healthy sales of general merchandise and vehicles remain the biggest driver behind the sector’s growth as they amounted to NT$109.1 billion and NT$64.7 billion each, increasing by 0.7 percent and 12.2 percent year-on-year last month.
The relatively small increase in sales of general merchandise, however, has chiefly department stores to blame, as they posted a 2.4 percent decline in sales last month due to a timing gap in the launching of annual promotional sales between last year and the year before.
Online sales including e-commerce and catalog sales remained robust, increasing 9 percent annually to NT$28.3 billion last month, as a result of the “Double 12” shopping event, Christmas holiday purchases and end-of-year banquets.
However, sales of network communications devices and home appliances continued to decline by 6.7 percent year-on-year to NT$18.5 billion as companies closed down several brick-and-mortar stores.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts