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.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS