Taiwan’s economy last quarter expanded 7.47 percent from a year earlier, 0.54 percentage points faster than last month’s official forecast, thanks to stronger-than-expected exports, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
“The domestic COVID-19 outbreak wreaked havoc with service-oriented sectors, but did not affect the manufacturing industry, which continued to benefit from the stay-at-home economy and gradual reopenings in the US and Europe,” Wu Pei-shuan (吳佩璇), an official at the agency’s national income section, told an online news conference.
Exports surged 37.35 percent year-on-year from April to June on the back of robust demand for electronics used in smartphones, laptops, TVs and vehicles, as well as artificial intelligence and Internet-of-Things applications.
Photo: CNA
Outbound shipments of plastic, chemical and base metal products also spiked more than 40 percent as customers around the world rebuilt inventory, DGBAS said.
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted schools, companies and government agencies to speed up digital transformation, thereby bolstering the selling prices of electronic components and contributing to supply crunches and shipping chaos, it said.
Imports soared 36.38 percent, driven by agricultural and industrial price hikes and avid purchases of capital equipment and consumer goods, the agency’s report showed.
Altogether, external demand contributed 5.19 percentage points to last quarter’s GDP, Wu said.
For the first half of the year, the economy grew 8.19 percent, meriting an upward revision next month, when the statistics agency updates its economic forecast. The official declined to speculate.
Domestically, private consumption shrank 0.55 percent, weighed down by a soft lockdown as the government on May 19 imposed a nationwide level 3 COVID-19 alert to curb the outbreak, the DGBAS said.
However, retail sales increased 2.29 percent year-on-year as e-commerce flourished, while physical stores and businesses were hit hard, Wu said.
Securities trading also thrived, with daily turnover growing more than twofold, she added.
Still, private consumption dragged GDP growth by 0.2 percentage points, the agency said.
The government lent support by adding 0.34 percentage points to GDP growth as it stepped up COVID-19 testing, vaccination and treatment expenses, DGBAS said.
The second quarter also saw capital formation swell 24.39 percent from a year earlier, as Taiwanese firms build up 5G infrastructure, green energy capacity, shipping vessels and semiconductor capital equipment to meet business needs, Wu said.
Overall, domestic demand made a lackluster contribution of 2.28 percentage points to GDP growth last quarter.
Wu said private consumption would fare better from this month following the conditional opening of entertainment and recreational facilities.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
POWER FORWARD: The US company’s bullish revenue projection also lifted the shares of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC and Japanese equipment supplier Advantest Nvidia Corp’s forecast for surging revenue surprised even the most bullish analysts on Wall Street, propelling the chipmaker to the cusp of a US$1 trillion market capitalization and igniting a global jump in stocks linked to artificial intelligence (AI). The Santa Clara, California-based company gained as much as 29 percent in extended US trading, on course for a record high, after saying it expects sales to reach about US$11 billion in the three months ending July. That gain puts Nvidia on track also to rack up the biggest one-day valuation jump in US company history. Nvidia, the biggest supplier of the advanced
RSS