Export orders rose 5.26 percent year-on-year to US$36.71 billion last month, the slowest increase since November 2009, Ministry of Economic Affairs figures showed.
The weaker momentum was caused by a slump in orders for electronics components and panels, the ministry said yesterday.
Orders for electronics components — including memory chips — contracted for the first time since October 2009 by 0.74 percent last month, while those for precision machinery — mainly LCD panels — continued to slump, shrinking 4.99 percent last month, the ministry said.
The eurozone debt crisis and a sluggish US economy, coupled with Japan just emerging from the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, drove electronics orders down to a new low, said Beatrice Tsai (蔡美娜), deputy-director of the ministry’s statistics department.
Sagging demand from China — Taiwan’s major panel importer, which is taking measures to cool the property market and tighten monetary policy — affected orders for Taiwanese precision machinery, Tsai said.
Raymond Yeung (楊宇霆), a senior economist at ANZ Research, said the ministry’s data confirmed that the global market turmoil had hampered Taiwan’s trade outlook and would cloud its growth prospects for the traditionally busy Christmas period.
Taiwanese exporters face an increasingly difficult macroeconomy in the near term, he added.
While orders for information and communications products grew 9.88 percent last month, they were significantly weaker compared with July’s year-on-year growth of 21.79 percent.
Tablets and smartphones continued to sell well, but the demand was discounted by overall macroeconomic uncertainties, the ministry said.
In terms of country breakdown, China placed US$9.62 billion worth of orders last month, up 3.44 percent year-on-year.
US orders rose 9.05 percent to US$8.37 billion, while those from Europe climbed 8.08 percent to US$6.48 billion.
The six ASEAN countries — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam — placed orders worth US$3.67 billion, rising 13.06 percent from last year.
However, orders from Japan dropped 9.52 percent to US$3.71 billion, because it was still reeling from the March disasters.
For the first eight months of the year, export orders totaled US$289 billion, up 9.98 percent from the same period last year.
The ministry said orders this month were expected to advance from last month based on its survey of vendors. Orders for the third quarter are forecast to expand by a single-digit percentage from the same period last year, the ministry said.
Export orders are an indicator of Taiwanese outbound shipments in the next one to three months.
Anna Bhobho, a 31-year-old housewife from rural Zimbabwe, was once a silent observer in her home, excluded from financial and family decisionmaking in the deeply patriarchal society. Today, she is a driver of change in her village, thanks to an electric tricycle she owns. In many parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa, women have long been excluded from mainstream economic activities such as operating public transportation. However, three-wheelers powered by green energy are reversing that trend, offering financial opportunities and a newfound sense of importance. “My husband now looks up to me to take care of a large chunk of expenses,
SECTOR LEADER: TSMC can increase capacity by as much as 20 percent or more in the advanced node part of the foundry market by 2030, an analyst said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to lead its peers in the advanced 2-nanometer process technology, despite competition from Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, TrendForce Corp analyst Joanne Chiao (喬安) said. TSMC’s sophisticated products and its large production scale are expected to allow the company to continue dominating the global 2-nanometer process market this year, Chiao said. The world’s largest contract chipmaker is scheduled to begin mass production of chips made on the 2-nanometer process in its Hsinchu fab in the second half of this year. It would also hold a ceremony on Monday next week to
TECH CLUSTER: The US company’s new office is in the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City, a new AI industry base and cybersecurity hub in southern Taiwan US chip designer Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) yesterday launched an office in Tainan’s Gueiren District (歸仁), marking a significant milestone in the development of southern Taiwan’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry, the Tainan City Government said in a statement. AMD Taiwan general manager Vincent Chern (陳民皓) presided over the opening ceremony for the company’s new office at the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City (沙崙智慧綠能科學城), a new AI industry base and cybersecurity hub in southern Taiwan. Facilities in the new office include an information processing center, and a research and development (R&D) center, the Tainan Economic Development Bureau said. The Ministry
Nvidia is to open a quantum computing research lab in Boston, where it plans to collaborate with scientists from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said on Thursday. Huang made the announcement at Nvidia’s annual software developer conference in San Jose, California, where the company held a day of events focused on quantum computing. Nvidia added the program after Huang in January said that useful quantum computers are 20 years away, comments that he sought to walk back on Thursday while joined onstage by executives from quantum computing firms. “This is the first event in history
RSS