Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Economy Continues to send negative signals

Amid the news about the domestic terrorist incident in Wisconsin, the Mars Rover landing, the Olympics, and sundry other incidents, Taiwan's economy continues to slow....WaPo says:
Taiwan’s exports fell 11.6 percent to $24.8 billion in July from a year earlier, contracting for a fifth consecutive month amid weak foreign demand for the island’s high-tech and other goods.

The Finance Ministry said Tuesday that imports declined 3.2 percent to $23.9 billion in July.

Exports to China fell 11 percent to $10 billion. Exports to the U.S. dropped 20 percent to $2.8 billion, following a sharp decline in smartphone sales by HTC Corp., Taiwan’s top handset maker.
RTT News had a nice graphic of Taiwan's exports... note the overall downward trend....

RTT reported that shipments of 3C stuff plummeted 34.5% YOY. Ugly. The RTT report observed:
Inflation surged to a near four-year high 0f 2.46 percent in July on higher food costs, limiting room for the central bank to ease monetary policy in response to flagging economic activity. Core inflation was 0.96 percent.
The recent surge in food prices is due to the typhoons and rain that have been battering us (FocusTaiwan says veggie prices rose nearly 33%, while fruit prices went up nearly 20%) , but with the massive drought in the US worldwide food prices are going to surge. This fall things are going to be tough...
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've worked in the Taiwan ODM/OEM export manufacturing business for over 20 years. Since around 2006 (pre-BS/LEH/AIG etc.) I've been telling manufacturers here a big shift downwards is coming, but no know would listen. All they care'd about was China expansion and continuing to get 500K/mo. orders. (hah!)

I've even given presentations to some tw.gov enterprises and how to position themselves for the future, but my talks have fallen on deaf ears. One of the problems people in Taiwan have is that if you give something away for free, they feel the knowledge is worthless.