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.
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