The nation’s machine tool exports for the first 11 months fell 8.8 percent year-on-year to US$1.83 billion, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI) said in a report released yesterday, with the pace of annual contraction worsening from 8.1 percent in the first 10 months.
Among all machine tool products, exports of metal-cutting machines fell 9.5 percent to US$1.51 billion, shipments of machine centers declined 7.3 percent to US$556.77 million, sales of lathes dropped 18.8 percent to US$394.16 million, and metal-forming machines saw a 5.1 percent decrease to US$317.93 million during the 11-month period, data showed.
Full-year machine tool exports are projected to reach about US$2 billion, marking a new low since the 2009 global financial crisis, the TAMI said.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA
The machine tool industry continues to face external challenges, including from tariffs, unfavorable exchange rates and geopolitical conflicts.
Last month alone, exports reached only US$165 million, an annual decline of 14.8 percent, with shipments to China, including Hong Kong — the sector’s largest export destination — down by 12.6 percent and those to the US, the second-largest market, plummeting 27.7 percent, the report said.
Due to weak market demand and a relatively strong New Taiwan dollar compared with regional rivals’ currencies, machine tool makers are facing heavy pressure to secure orders, it said.
Although the NT dollar has depreciated slightly against the US dollar, its pace of weakening is still smaller than that of its regional competitors, the report said.
For example, with the yen, Taiwan’s price advantage — with machinery equipment priced 20 to 30 percent lower than Japanese products in the past — has effectively disappeared, as from 2021 to yesterday, the NT dollar had depreciated 9.8 percent, much less than the yen’s 52.2 percent plunge, it said.
However, the association emphasized that the overall machinery industry is slowly recovering, as total machinery exports grew 8.5 percent year-on-year to US$28.87 billion in the first 11 months of the year.
The association attributed the growth to increases in outbound shipments of inspection and testing equipment, and electronic equipment — benefiting from increasing demand for machinery goods related to artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and cloud computing products — offset the drop in machine tool sales.
Still, in NT dollar terms, total machinery exports were NT$897.37 billion in the first 11 months, up 5.3 percent from a year earlier, an indication that the NT dollar’s appreciation this year has eroded the real growth of export value, it said.
From January to last month, the US remained the largest buyer of Taiwanese machinery goods at US$7.52 billion, accounting for 26 percent of the nation’s total exports, the report showed.
China ranked second at US$6.58 billion and accounted for 22.8 percent of the total, followed by Japan at US$2.22 billion with a share of 7.7 percent, it found.
As shipments to the US and China both showed double-digit percentage growth in the past two months, along with the easing of global economic uncertainty, Taiwan’s full-year machinery exports are expected to increase by about 9 percent from last year, the association projected.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS