Taiwan’s export orders last month expanded 18.2 percent from a year earlier to US$33.8 billion, marking the fourth-highest amount on record thanks to rising demand for Taiwan-made panels, computers and handsets, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
Export orders are an indication of Taiwan’s product shipments to overseas markets over the next one to three months. The highest amount was set in March at US$34.4 billion, and the second highest followed in June at US$34.2 billion, with the third in April at US$33.96 billion.
According to the ministry’s statistics department, cumulative export orders for January to last month totaled US$227.9 billion, a rise of 35.2 percent year-on-year.
Moving into the peak season in the second half of the year, the whole-year amount is expected to surpass US$400 billion, up from US$322.4 billion last year, said Huang Ji-shih (黃吉實), director of the statistics department.
The 18.2 percent growth in export orders last month, however, is below Citigroup’s forecast of a 21.3 percent increase. More importantly, export orders declined by 1.4 percent month-on-month after seasonal adjustment, marking the second month of decline, the brokerage firm said in a client note yesterday.
By country, China remained the biggest market for Taiwanese goods as it placed orders worth US$9.1 billion last month, a year-on-year growth of 10.8 percent, while orders from Europe rose 11.6 percent to US$5.3 billion and the US placed 20.3 percent more orders to US$7.5 billion, Huang said.
Six ASEAN countries — Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — ordered US$3.3 billion in products from Taiwan, a growth of 17.1 percent from a year earlier.
In terms of three major product categories, orders for information and communications products — consisting of handsets and notebooks — advanced 17.5 percent from a year earlier to US$7.7 billion last month.
Orders for electronics, including semiconductors and memory chips, rose 20.6 percent to US$8.4 billion.
Orders for the precision machinery sector, including panels, grew 15.5 percent to US$3.2 billion.
Looking forward, orders for this month are forecast to grow from last month’s, with the total hitting as much as US$35 billion — which could again set a new high, Huang said.
“Some individual firms have indicated a rise in sales of 5 percent to 10 percent in August from July,” he said, but cast uncertainties over notebook orders.
Because of excess inventories built up at the retail end in the second quarter, computer firms such as Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s second-largest PC maker, saw a nearly 40 percent sales drop last month.
“Notebook orders have to be further monitored,” Huang said.
The whole-year amount is achievable on peak seasonality, he said, adding that momentum would come from China’s Golden week in October and the 16th Asian Games — the world’s second-largest sports games after the Olympics — to be held in Guangzhou in November.
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