Industrial production climbed 0.78 percent year-on-year last month, backed by robust growth in the output of electronics components, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
Manufacturing output, which accounted for more than 90 percent of total industrial production, expanded 2.02 percent annually last month, beating the ministry’s forecast of a flattish performance.
For the first five months of the year, it rose 4.88 percent compared with the same period last year, the ministry’s statistics showed.
While this quarter is usually a slow season for the electronics components sector, it turned out better than government expectations this year, Department of Statistics Deputy Director-General Wang Shu-chuan (王淑娟) told a news conference.
The production of electronics components, which contributed nearly 30 percent to total manufacturing output, surged 5.19 percent last month, due to semiconductor clients’ smooth inventory digestion, Wang said.
Persistent demand for LCD panels and color filters used in TVs also lent support to the sectors’ output, she said.
The production of petrochemical products grew 3.25 percent last month as the market recovered, basic metals increased 2.7 percent and machinery tools climbed 7.48 percent from a year earlier, she said.
However, the production of computers and optical products continued to linger in negative territory last month, with an annual decline of 12.23 percent, due to declining production of smartphones and virtual-reality (VR) devices, Wang said.
Wang said the ministry expects manufacturing output this month to grow by between 1 percent and 2 percent on an annual basis, leading to growth of 1.5 percent for this quarter.
In a separate release, ministry statistics showed that revenue in the wholesale sector rose 3.5 percent year-on-year to NT$805.2 billion (US$26.49 billion) last month, driven by vigorous export demand for flat panels, memory chips and servers.
The wholesale sector’s revenues in the first five months of the year grew 4.8 percent year-on-year to NT$3.92 trillion, the statistics showed.
Retail sector revenue expanded mildly by 1 percent annually to NT$338.5 billion last month, while sales in the restaurants and beverages sector increased 2.7 percent to NT$38.5 billion, ministry data showed.
Wang said the retail sector, which mainly reflects domestic demand, dropped 0.1 percent to NT$1.67 trillion in revenue in the January to May period.
Warm weather in the first quarter affected sales of winter clothes and related products, Wang said, adding that the declining number of Chinese tourists and falling sales of luxury goods dragged down revenue in the retail sector.
A recovering global economy has helped Taiwan’s exports performance and benefited the wholesale sector, but it seems that domestic demand has yet to benefit from the global pickup, Wang said.
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