Taiwan ranked 16th among the world’s economies in merchandise trade last year, its highest ranking in 16 years, due in part to a higher ranking for imports, the Ministry of Finance said on Thursday.
Taiwan had US$827.9 billion in total merchandise trade last year, lifting it one notch in the rankings from a year earlier, the ministry said in a report, citing WTO data.
Among the four traditional Asian Tigers with high-growth economies, Taiwan’s total trade last year trailed that of Hong Kong (in sixth place), South Korea (eighth) and Singapore (15th), the report said.
World merchandise exports totaled US$22.3 trillion last year, an increase of 26.3 percent from the previous year, the WTO’s latest global merchandise trade data showed.
The ministry attributed the growth to the global recovery and higher demand.
Major world economies posted higher merchandise exports and imports than before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, it said.
The nation’s US$446.4 billion in merchandise exports accounted for 2 percent of global exports, ranking it 16th in the world, down from 15th in 2020, while its US$381.5 billion in merchandise imports accounted for 1.7 percent of the global total, ranking it 17th worldwide, up from 18th in 2020, the report said.
China exported US$3.4 trillion in goods last year, making it the world’s biggest exporting country with a 15.1 percent share of global exports.
It was followed by the US (7.9 percent), Germany (7.3 percent), the Netherlands (3.8 percent), Japan (3.4 percent) and Hong Kong (3.0 percent).
South Korea, Taiwan’s main competitor in the global trade market, reported US$644 billion in merchandise exports, accounting for 2.9 percent of world merchandise exports and ranking seventh worldwide, it showed.
The world’s top five importing countries last year were the US, China, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.
The report also looked at how global trade has evolved over the past decade and China’s increasing export prominence.
China has been the world’s largest exporter since 2009, “benefiting from its domination of manufacturing supply chains and participating in regional economic and trade integration,” it said.
From 2011 to last year, China’s share of global exports rose 4.7 percentage points, compared with Hong Kong’s 0.5 percentage points and Taiwan’s 0.3 percentage points.
Japan and Germany’s share of exports during the same period fell 1.1 and 0.7 percentage points respectively, and export shares of the US, Singapore and South Korea edged lower by 0.2, 0.1 and 0.1 percentage points respectively, the report said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS