Exports last month recorded another double-digit drop for the seventh consecutive month as demand from major trading partners remained weak, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
Outbound shipments last month declined 35.7 percent from last year to US$15.59 billion, while imports dropped 49.5 percent to US$12.17 billion, leaving a trade surplus of US$3.41 billion, the ministry’s latest data showed.
Lin Lee-jen (林麗貞), head of the ministry’s statistics department, said yesterday that the contraction, while sizable, had slowed from the 37.2 percent decline in January and February combined (to factor in the holiday effect) and a 41.9 percent plunge in December.
“The trade volume marked an increase of US$2.99 billion from a month earlier, indicating the slump [in exports] is not worsening,” Lin said, attributing the improvement to rush orders for consumer electronic products from China.
Shipments to China, including Hong Kong, fell 37.5 percent from a year earlier to US$6.3 billion, while exports to the US and Japan sank 22.4 percent and 34.5 percent to US$2.04 billion and US$1.03 billion respectively, the report showed.
Exports to Europe and ASEAN countries dropped 36 percent and 44 percent to US$1.73 billion and US$2.07 billion respectively, the report said.
Electronics, basic metals, plastics, chemicals and other major export products saw declines of between 22 percent and 58 percent. Shipments of bicycles were the exception, rising 3.3 percent to US$858 million from a year earlier, the report said.
In the first three months of the year, exports dropped 36.6 percent from last year to US$40.55 billion and imports plunged 47.2 percent to US$32.06 billion, resulting in a trade surplus of US8.49 billion.
Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂), head economist at Citigroup Taiwan Inc, said that the quarterly drop was a cause for concern.
Cheng, whose firm forecast the nation’s GDP would contract 8.2 percent in the first quarter, said the final results might turn out worse than expected.
“Despite rush orders, exports deteriorated more sharply than in the fourth quarter, when the drop hit 24.7 percent and the economy contracted 8.36 percent,” Cheng said by telephone.
Cheng said he would not be surprised if GDP contracted by 10 percent in the first quarter, even though the government put the decline at 6.51 percent.
Meanwhile, Tony Phoo (符銘財), chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank who has forecast that the economy would shrink by 4.9 percent in the first quarter, said talks of a recovery were premature as the US and European economies, the main consumers of Taiwanese exports, have yet to stabilize.
Taiwan’s technology protection rules prohibits Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) from producing 2-nanometer chips abroad, so the company must keep its most cutting-edge technology at home, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks in response to concerns that TSMC might be forced to produce advanced 2-nanometer chips at its fabs in Arizona ahead of schedule after former US president Donald Trump was re-elected as the next US president on Tuesday. “Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2-nanometer chips overseas currently,” Kuo said at a meeting of the legislature’s
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
RSS