Singapore’s industrial production fell for a second month in May, the first back-to-back decline since 2009, after pharmaceutical and electronic manufacturers reduced output as global demand eased.
Manufacturing, which accounts for about a quarter of the economy, fell 17.5 percent in May from a year earlier after a 9.5 percent drop in April, the Economic Development Board said in a statement today. That was more than the median estimate of 11 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News for a 9.3 percent decline.
Europe’s debt crisis and slowing U.S. growth are damping demand for exports from Asia, which may curb expansion in a region that has led the global economic recovery. Exports by Singapore companies such as electronics manufacturing services provider Venture Corp. are predicted by the government to grow in 2011 at about a third the pace of last year, when overseas shipments jumped the most since 2003.
“It’s hard to decouple fully from the external economies of the U.S. and E.U. because that’s where most of the major export markets lie,” Chow Penn Nee, an economist at United Overseas Bank Ltd. in Singapore, said before the report. “The technology sector seems soft, but we think it should pick up in the second half of this year, although a great rebound is not expected.
No comments:
Post a Comment