Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore are maturing toward post-industrial status as manufacturing investments in Asia move to China, an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report said yesterday.
The combined share of the quartet of "newly industrialized economies," (NIEs) along with China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, in global manufacturing output has more than doubled to almost 14 percent between the 1980s and 2004, it said.
However, the NIEs, especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, have "undergone severe deindustrialization as manufacturing has lost significant weight in total output between the 1970s and 2000-2004," the report said.
The NIEs, also known as Asian "tigers," are now going through a process similar to those of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations, "the result of transferring production facilities" to China, it said.
Still, other than Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, none of the developing Asian economies had a share of employment in manufacturing as high as that of the OECD average, the report said.
In terms of labor productivity, "there is still a large differential between most developing Asian economies and the OECD," it said.
Many of these economies apparently "have industrialized at low levels of productivity due to the bias toward low-productivity industries, which in turn accounted for most of the increase in employment, it said.
Nevertheless, the production structure has become slightly more diversified with electrical and non-electrical machinery and transport equipment now accounting for 34 percent of developing Asia's manufacturing and food and beverages, textiles, apparel, leather and footwear accounting for 22 percent.
In the 1970s, the latter accounted for 39 percent of the total and the former accounted for just 17 percent.
Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore have all shifted their manufacturing output to more technology and scale-intensive sub-sectors, leading to faster growth.
In China and India, the shift "is taking place more slowly, while in most other Asian countries the evidence is lacking."
By 2000 to 2003, developing Asia's share of manufacturing involving medium or strong economies of scale and medium or strong technology has risen to 11.3 percent from 2.9 percent in the 1970s, the ADB said.
The OECD countries still accounted for 82.7 percent, down from 90.9 percent.
The region's share of manufacturing output in sectors involving low economies of scale and low technology stood at 12.8 percent early in this decade, up from 4.9 percent in the 1970s.
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
Chinese entrepreneur Frank Gao used to spend long hours running his social media accounts but now outsources the chore to artificial intelligence (AI) agent tool OpenClaw, which is taking China by storm despite official warnings over cybersecurity. OpenClaw, created in November by an Austrian coder, differs from bots such as ChatGPT because it can execute real-life tasks such as sending e-mails, organizing files or even booking flight tickets. “Since January, I’ve spent hours on the lobster every day,” Gao said in an interview, referring to OpenClaw’s red crustacean mascot. “We’re family.” After downloading OpenClaw, users connect it to artificial intelligence models of their
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS