Singapore's total trade declined further by 9.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, with year-on-year decline seen for both non-oil domestic exports (NODX) and non-oil re-exports (NORX), the country's trade promotion agency said Wednesday.
Non-oil domestic exports (NODX), a key gauge of the export performance of the economy, contracted 9.0 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2016, due to lower shipments of both electronic and non-electronic NODX, said International Enterprise (IE) Singapore.
Exports of electronic products contracted by 3.4 percent in the first quarter, after the decline of 1.0 percent in the previous quarter. The decrease can be attributed to lower domestic exports of ICs, parts of PCs and disk drives.
Non-electronic NODX decreased by 11.3 percent in the first quarter, mainly because of lower domestic exports of structures of ships & boats, primary chemicals and petrochemicals.
While NODX to Hong Kong and Japan expanded on a yearly basis, NODX to all the rest of the top markets decreased in the first quarter. The biggest contributors to contraction were Chinese mainland, China's Taiwan and the EU 28.
Specifically, NODX to Chinese mainland decreased by 14.6 percent, after the previous quarter's decline of 12.3 percent. NODX to Taiwan declined by 18.5 percent, following the previous quarter's contraction of 12.9 percent.
On a year-on-year basis, Singapore's total merchandise trade in the first quarter declined by 9.7 percent, following a contraction of 7.7 percent in the previous quarter. The decline can be attributed to the decrease in both oil and non-oil trade, which dropped 36.2 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively.
Singapore's total services trade declined by 0.1 percent in the first quarter, following the 0.3 percent decrease in the preceding quarter.
For the whole year of 2016, IE Singapore's projections for NODX and total trade have been revised downwards to between -5.0 and -3. 0 percent, and -8.0 and -6.0 percent respectively.
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