The government’s business monitoring system last month flashed “green” for the fifth consecutive month, reflecting a moderate, but continued improvement in the economy, the National Development Council said yesterday.
The council’s composite monitoring indicators seek to measure growth or decline in nine areas of the economy.
The overall score — which includes the leading and coincident indicators — increased by 2 points from October to 26 points last month, its highest level in the past 26 months.
“The performance came on the back of improving exports and local manufacturers’ increasing shipments,” council research director Wu Ming-huei (吳明蕙) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
The council uses a five-color system to categorize Taiwan’s economic health, with “blue” signaling a recession, “green” steady growth and “red” overheating, while “yellow-blue” indicates a transition between recession and growth, and “yellow-red” a transition between growth and overheating.
The customer-cleared exports and producers’ shipments for manufacturing readings both shifted from “yellow-blue” to “green” last month, while seven other business gauges remained unchanged.
Most other gauges also flashed “green,” including the indices for M1B money supply, the local bourse, the industrial production index and the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research’s manufacturing composite indicator.
The gauges for non-agricultural employment and for sales in the retail, wholesale and restaurant sectors flashed “yellow-blue,” while the sub-index for imports of machinery and electrical equipment was “red” last month, the report showed.
The index of leading indicators, which is used to gauge the nation’s short-term economic outlook, slightly decreased from 100.36 in October to 100.31 last month, the report showed.
The council attributed the slowdown to fewer building permits being issued during the period, reflecting a slowdown in Taiwan’s construction industry.
Despite the decline, five other components trended up, indicating an improvement in the nation’s economy, Wu told reporters.
Taiwanese semiconductor companies’ orders and shipments last month soared 21.22 percent and 25.22 percent year-on-year respectively, she cited statistics as saying.
The index of coincident indicators, which is used to gauge current economic conditions, reported its ninth consecutive month of increases, up from 103.42 points in October to 104.39 last month.
Wu said that domestic demand might further benefit from local semiconductor makers’ investments in advanced processing technologies and the approaching high season for domestic retailers.
Although optimistic about the economy’s outlook, the council said the government would keep an eye on US economic policies and the effects of Brexit.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
RSS