South Korea’s exports fell less than economists estimated last month, adding to signs that trade may start to rebound from the slump triggered by the global financial crisis.
Overseas shipments declined 8.3 percent from a year earlier to US$34 billion, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said yesterday in Gwacheon.
The median estimate of 10 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for an 11.8 percent drop.
Imports fell 16.3 percent to US$30.2 billion, resulting in a trade surplus of US$3.8 billion.
“Exports are still on the decline, but Korea will see an increase in coming months,” said Lee Sang-jae, an economist at Hyundai Securities Co in Seoul. “Demand from China is helping sustain South Korean exports, while orders from the US and elsewhere still remain weak.”
Exports, which make up more than half of the economy, may start to rebound this month, the government said last month.
Samsung Electronics Co, Asia’s biggest maker of chips, flat screens and mobile phones, said on Friday that profit tripled to a quarterly record. LG Electronics Inc reported quarterly profit that beat analysts’ estimates, boosted by record shipments of televisions and higher sales of appliances.
The nation’s GDP expanded 2.9 percent in the third quarter from three months earlier, the fastest pace in seven years.
South Korean Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun said full-year economic growth is possible this year, compared with an earlier forecast of a 1.5 percent contraction.
Exports to China, the biggest buyer of South Korean goods, gained 3.4 percent in the first 20 days of last month. Exports to the US slid 37.4 percent, the ministry said. Shipments to Japan declined 22.5 percent over the same period.
Car exports dropped 39.3 percent in the first 20 days of last month and semiconductor shipments gained 32.8 percent from the same period last year.
There are additional signs South Korea’s economy is recovering. Factory production gained at the fastest pace in three months in September, manufacturers’ confidence stayed near a two-year high and consumer confidence climbed to a seven-year high, earlier reports showed.
Economies across Asia are “rebounding fast” from the global crisis, helped by fiscal support that the region’s governments must maintain amid weak global export demand, the IMF said on Thursday.
Growth in Asia including Japan, Australia and New Zealand will probably accelerate to 5.8 percent next year from 2.8 percent this year, it said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS