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Mon, October 26, 2020 – 1:00 pm
SINGAPORE’s factory output jumped 24.2 percent year-on-year in September, driven by a near doubling in output from the volatile biomedical group, figures from Singapore’s Economic Development Board showed on Monday.
This far exceeded economists’ expectations of 2.5 percent growth, and was higher than August’s upwardly revised figure of 15.4 percent growth.
If biomedical manufacturing is excluded, production was still increasing 8.5 percent year-on-year. On a seasonally adjusted monthly basis, industrial production increased 10.1 percent in September, but fell 1.6 percent excluding biomedical manufacturing.
The surprising growth in September was driven by 89.8 percent growth in biomedical manufacturing production, led by a 113.6 percent increase in pharmaceutical production. The medical technology segment also grew 15 percent, with higher export demand for medical instruments.
So far this year, biomedical manufacturing continues to be the best performing group, 26.6% more than in the same period of the previous year.
The electronics group continued to perform well, with an increase of 30.1% in September. This was led by 37.4 percent growth in the semiconductor segment, supported by demand for cloud services, data centers and the 5G market. During the first nine months of the year, electronics production increased 7 percent over the prior year period.
The chemicals group posted a marginal 0.4 percent increase in production, with increases in the specialty (25.2 percent) and other chemicals (6.7 percent) segments barely outpacing contractions in petrochemicals (-7.3 percent) and oil (-25.7 percent). percent) segments, due to plant maintenance shutdowns. So far this year, the production of chemical products remains below that of the previous year, falling 3.5 percent.
The remaining three groups experienced year-on-year declines in September.
Precision-engineered production saw its first decline since May, 1.5 percent, with declines in all segments. Still, so far this year, the cluster’s production has increased 10 percent over the prior year period.
Overall manufacturing output continued to experience declines in all segments, with the group’s output falling 8 percent, although this marked a slowdown from the previous two months of contraction. So far this year, the group’s production is down 12.6 percent.
Transportation engineering remains the worst performer so far this year, falling 35.8 percent in September. Although the land segment grew 35.1%, this was offset by declines in the marine and offshore engineering (-40.9%) and aerospace (-44%) segments, and new orders remained low due to the weakness of the global oil and gas market. and Covid-19 travel restrictions respectively. Transportation engineering production fell 24 percent in the first nine months of the year, compared to the prior year period.
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