Taiwan’s export orders last month expanded 43.66 percent from a year earlier to US$34.39 billion, marking the highest total in the nation’s history on the back of strong demand from Asia-Pacific markets for Taiwan-made panels, computers and handsets.
“China and Japan fueled growth,” Huang Ji-shih (黃吉實), director of the statistics department at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, told a press conference yesterday.
Orders are an indication of Taiwan’s shipments in the next one to three months to foreign markets.
Last month’s amount beat the previous record set in October 2007, when export orders totaled US$32.2 billion, Huang said.
Last month’s 43.66 percent growth, for which a rise of 38.64 percent was forecast in a Reuters poll, is the sixth consecutive month of growth as the country emerges from the global financial crisis.
January orders grew 71.8 percent year-on-year to US$30.4 billion, while those for February rose 36.25 percent to US$27.41 billion.
“The March result is stronger than the market consensus forecast of 38.0 percent and our expectation of 40.0 percent,” Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), head economist at Citigroup Taiwan Inc, said yesterday.
China, which is procuring increasing numbers of Taiwanese LCD panels, ordered US$9.8 billion in products last month, a year-on-year growth of 59.7 percent, while Japan, whose consumers are fond of Taiwanese handsets, saw orders jump 93.6 percent to US$4 billion, Huang said.
Japan’s total was the highest on record and its growth was the second highest in history, he said.
Six ASEAN countries — Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — ordered US$3.2 billion in products from Taiwan last month, a growth of 61.8 percent from a year earlier.
In the first three months of the year, total orders were US$92.17 billion, up 49.31 percent from the same period last year and 28.03 percent higher than the previous quarter’s, ministry statistics showed.
Cheng said he expected second-quarter exports to beat seasonality despite a slowing growth year-on-year, thanks to a better global economic outlook and strong orders industry-wide.
By product, orders for precision machinery, including panels, saw the strongest growth at 87.8 percent to US$3.24 billion last month.
Information and communications products — consisting of handsets and notebooks — advanced 40.3 percent from a year earlier to US$8.19 billion last month.
Electronic wares, which include semiconductors and memory modules, rose 39.1 percent to US$8.27 billion.
Huang said export orders for this month were “expected to sustain the momentum, but the amount will not surpass those seen in March.”
Looming hindrances include shortages of raw materials and components and the launch of the Windows 7 operating system, which has not prompted more consumers to replace their older PCs as expected, and customers do not appear to be interested in buying new tech devices at the moment, said Huang.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
RSS