Export Boom?

Weekended in Hong Kong this week. 

Exports in September rose 10.4%, welcome news to Taiwan's export driven economy. TT reports:

Outbound shipments totaled US$27.17 billion last month, up 10.4 percent from August and marking the highest level in 14 months, the ministry said in a report.

These drove exports in the first nine months to US$223.56 billion, down 3.9 percent from a year earlier, the report said.

“The recovering demand from the Asian region made Taiwan’s exports last month report a double-digit growth from a year ago,” Yeh Maan-tzwu (葉滿足), director of the ministry’s statistics department, told a press conference.

Growth had fallen 4.2% in August year-on-year. Are we getting a recovery? Everyone says the same thing: too early to tell. Another source noted:

The rise in September exports was led by demand from China (including HK, 8.4% MoM), ASEAN (16.8%) and Japan (22.7%). The increase in Chinese demand was seen in both consumer goods and capital goods – electronics (11.3% MoM), optical instruments (11.3%), chemicals (19.0%) and minerals.

This should be in part due to the modest improvement in China’s domestic demand on the back of policy stimulus measures. The temporary factors could have also been at play, such as the launch of new smartphone products that coincided with China’s golden week holiday this year.

Meanwhile, as a result of the ongoing China-Japan political tensions, Chinese manufacturing firms may temporarily switch their import orders from Japan to the alternative suppliers in the region, which could benefit Taiwanese exporters of electronics components.

Digitimes had some data via the MOF:

It also observed that....

Among different categories of Taiwan-made products, electronics had the largest export value of US$7.747 billion in September, growing by 8.6% on month and by 10.5% on year.

The government was cautiously optimistic about growth in the near term, but we'll have to see whether the international financial houses change their low estimates of growth for Taiwan this year.
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