Wed, Feb 18, 2009 page11

• Singapore exports suffer biggest drop on record

  SAGGING DRAGON Last month’s decline in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy was the ninth contraction in a row and exceeded the 20.8 percent fall in December

  • AFP
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  Singapore’s key exports last month fell by the largest amount on record, the government said yesterday, releasing data showing further evidence of the city-state’s deepening recession.

  Non-oil domestic exports (NODX) fell by 34.8 percent last month compared with the same month a year earlier, said International Enterprise Singapore, the government’s trade promotion agency.

  It is the biggest fall since the government began year-on-year comparisons in 1977 and exceeded the previous record of a 30.7 percent drop in September 2001, after al-Qaeda’s attacks in the US.

  Last month’s decline was the ninth consecutive contraction and was almost in line with the 34.5 percent median forecast in a recent poll of economists by Dow Jones Newswires.

  The decline last month exceeded the 20.8 percent year-on-year fall recorded in December, the data showed.

  Shipments to all 10 key markets were lower last month, with exports to the major US market falling 50 percent, the agency said.

  The city-state is Southeast Asia’s wealthiest economy in terms of GDP per capita, but its heavy dependence on trade makes it sensitive to economic disturbances in developed nations, whose economies are suffering in the world’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

  Singapore in October became the first Asian economy to enter recession.

  NODX to China — whose economy slowed dramatically at the end of last year — were down 51.6 percent, the agency said.

  On a month-on-month seasonally adjusted basis, NODX fell by 3.2 percent last month after the previous month’s 11 percent decrease, it said.

  The key exports were worth S$10.04 billion (US$6.69 billion) last month, a fall of 34.8 percent from a year earlier, data showed.

  Almost 40 percent of the NODX value comes from electronic products such as disk drives but the category fell by 38.4 percent last month.

  That was the sector’s worst single-month fall since September 2001, said Song Seng Wun, regional economist with CIMB-GK Research.

  Non-electronic exports, including chemicals, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, were down 32.4 percent, International Enterprise Singapore said.

  Overall, last month’s fall was bad, “but it could have been worse,” Song said.

  “It’s bad, but in line with what we see in Taiwan, [South] Korean and Chinese markets,” Song said.

  Singapore twice downgraded its growth forecasts last month.

  Meanwhile, data showed that pharmaceutical shipments were down 4.5 percent, compared with declines of about 50 percent the previous two months.

  Alvin Liew, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank, said he expected Singapore exports to continue their “dismal” performance at least for the first half of the year.

  The government now sees shrinkage of between 2 percent and 5 percent for this year, after estimated growth of 1.2 percent last year.

  But Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam warned this month the economic crisis will be drawn out.

  “We are seeing continued momentum in the economy declining week by week,” he said.

  In his budget speech last month, Shanmugaratnam had announced a stimulus package of S$20.5 billion and said S$4.9 billion of that would come from the national savings, which had never been drawn on.
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