Saturday, July 25, 2009

A blow to market expectations

SINGAPORE'S manufacturing output declined 9.3 per cent in June from a year earlier, coming in worse-than-market expectations.

Dow Jones-polled economists had predicted that output would fall 6.4 per cent on-year. Compared to May, industrial production contracted 9.2 per cent after adjusting for seasonal factors.

June's output was weighed down by double-digit contractions in the electronics, transport engineering and precision engineering clusters. Electronics output declined 20.4 per cent from a year earlier due to continued weakness in global demand for electronics products.

Meanwhile, the transport engineering cluster contracted 12.4 per cent over the same period, mainly due to lower output from both the aerospace and marine and offshore engineering segments. The biomedical manufacturing cluster remained the bright spot, expanding 11.6 per cent in June, thanks to increased output in pharmaceuticals.

In all, industrial production in the first six months of this year dropped 14 percent from a year earlier.


Source: Today, 25 July 2009

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