Singapore’s electronics shipments grew the most since 2010, fueled by overseas sales of ICs and disk media products, as a global technology boom is proving a boon to the city-state.
Electronics exports rose 35.1 percent last month from a year earlier, following a revised increase of 16.8 percent the previous month, data released yesterday by Enterprise Singapore showed.
That was the fastest growth since June 2010.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The robust performance of electronics is providing the momentum for Singapore to meet, if not surpass, its GDP forecast of growing at the upper half of its 1 percent to 3 percent projected band.
The city-state is home to some of the largest chip manufacturing plants in Southeast Asia. Singapore and the broader Southeast Asia region are benefiting as companies diversify their tech supply chains beyond Taiwan and China to reduce risks related to tensions between Washington and Beijing.
“There is market talk that China is front-loading chips in anticipation of potential trade tariffs from the US that are targeted at China,” Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (華僑銀行) chief economist Selena Ling (林秀心) wrote in a note. “Many uncertainties remain due to the US-China confrontation.”
Global tech companies have announced billions of dollars of fresh investments in the region this year, encouraged by demand for new services such as generative artificial intelligence.
Still, trade-reliant Singapore has reason to be cautious as non-oil domestic exports were up 10.7 percent, below the 15 percent median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.
Month-on-month, overseas sales declined by 4.7 percent, reversing the 12.2 percent expansion in July.
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