Wed, Apr 09, 2008 page12

• March exports surge to two-year high

  ROBUST GROWTH With imports posting even sharper growth amid soaring crude oil prices, the trade surplus last month fell 92.4 percent to US$170 million from a year ago

  • By Jerry Lin And Kevin Chen / STAFF REPORTER
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  Exports last month posted double-digit growth to US$24.25 billion, the highest level since March 2006, the Ministry of Finance announced yesterday.

  Outbound shipments last month grew 22.8 percent year-on-year, outpacing February’s 18.5 percent growth and beating most economists’ forecasts.

  Deutsche Bank had predicted an export growth of 17 percent, while Citi Investment Research forecast a 10.85 percent rise.

  “The continued strength in exports poses an upside risk to our growth and rates outlook,” Deutsche Bank said in an e-mail to Taipei Times yesterday.

  With exports rising to a two-year high, the solid momentum “may provide further room for NTD appreciation,” Citigroup’s chief economist Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂) said in a client note released yesterday.

  Imports, meanwhile, grew 37.3 percent year-on-year to US$24.08 billion last month, the Ministry of Finance’s data showed.

  “The increasing import volume can be attributed to the growing [import] of international crude oil and machinery and electronics equipment,” Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳), deputy director of the ministry’s Department of Statistics, said during a press briefing yesterday.

  Offset by the increasing imports, the trade surplus only amounted to US$170 million last month, down US$2.05 billion, or 92.4 percent from the same period a year ago, the ministry’s tallies showed.

  Crude oil, which accounted for 14 percent of the nation’s imports last month, skyrocketed 114.3 percent year-on-year to US$3.38 billion.

  Imports of crude oil climbed 25.4 percent year-on-year to 36.36 million barrels last month, while crude oil prices surged as high as 70.3 percent from US$54.41 in March last year to US$92.68 per barrel last month, Hsu said.

  Although the trade surplus last month dropped to its lowest level since March 2006, Hsu said that the growth in export and import volumes in the first quarter were better than expected.

  In the three months ending March, exports rose 17.6 percent year-on-year to US$64.05 billion, while imports climbed 25.9 percent to US$60.66 billion, department of statistics data showed.

  Those numbers outpaced the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics’ forecasts in February that exports and imports would grow by 9.4 percent and 10.5 percent respectively in the first quarter.

  By region, shipments to Hong Kong/China and six Southeast Asian states grew from 26.6 percent and 11.9 percent in 2001 to 40.3 percent and 15.5 percent respectively in the first quarter. Meanwhile, the ratio of shipments to Europe, the US and Japan decreased.

  Hsu said the ministry was still upbeat about the export outlook as the recent NT dollar appreciation had not negatively affected export performance as expected based on the latest data.

  Citigroup also said the resilient export growth last month could help ease concerns about the impact of a US slowdown and the global market turbulence on Taiwan.

  However, Sumei Tang, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com in Sydney, does not agree.

  Tang said she expected Taiwan’s exports to slow in the coming months as demand from China and other Asian countries for Taiwanese goods may not be strong enough to mitigate the decline in orders from the US and the other Western countries, she said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
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