Export orders rose 21.4 percent year-on-year to US$55.3 billion last month, marking the best July figure ever, statistics from the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) yesterday showed.
Last month’s figure beat the expectations of the ministry, which predicted another robust annual growth this month.
Export orders are forecast to reach US$55 billion to US$56.5 billion this month, up 20.9 percent to 24.2 percent on an annual basis, the ministry said.
Last month also represented the 17th month of consecutive annual growth for orders. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for Taiwanese tech products has boomed due to work-from-home and distance-learning trends.
The demand for electronics has not weakened, and has been complemented by a recovery in demand among traditional sectors, such as chemicals, basic metals and plastic products, ministry data showed.
“With global recovery strengthening, we are seeing strong demand for both high-tech and traditional sectors,” Department of Statistics Director Huang Yu-ling (黃于玲) told a videoconference.
Orders for electronics and information and communications technology products grew 22.3 and 4.4 percent respectively, while orders for basic metals jumped 64.7 percent year-on-year, ministry data showed.
Orders for chemical products surged 42.3 percent and those for plastic products soared 44 percent, the data showed.
Despite rapidly increasing vaccination rates in major economies such as the US and the EU, a COVID-19 resurgence due to the spread of the Delta variant, especially in Southeast Asia, is a potential cause for concern for Taiwanese manufacturers.
In the past three months, 240,000 new cases were confirmed in Vietnam alone.
“Of the 98 companies with manufacturing facilities in the affected regions that answered our survey, 33 had to temporarily suspend taking orders,” Huang said.
“However, the overall number affected is still small and many companies have the ability to transfer orders to their Chinese or other plants,” she said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
China Vanke Co (萬科), China’s last major developer to have so far avoided default amid an unprecedented property crisis, has been left with little time to keep debt failure at bay after creditors spurned its proposal to push back a looming bond payment. Once China’s biggest homebuilder by sales, Vanke failed to obtain sufficient support for its plan to delay paying the 2 billion yuan (US$283.51 million) note due today, a filing to the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors showed late on Saturday. The proposal, along with two others on the ballot, would have allowed a one-year extension. All three
RSS