SINGAPORE'S trade remains stuck in the red despite much talk of green shoots, with numbers well down again in June. Slumping global consumption continues to crimp exporters, who had received hopeful signs of recovery in May only to see them wiped away last month.
Non-oil domestic exports for last month fell 11 per cent from a year earlier, the 14th consecutive month of annual contractions.
They were also down 5.2 per cent from May on a seasonally adjusted basis, but exports in that month had actually risen 5.3 per cent over April's effort. 'It is still a rough road to export recovery,' said CIMB-GK economist Song Seng Wun. 'No matter how you slice and dice it, the headline numbers still show a contraction.'
If there was any consolation, June's 11 per cent pace of decline over the same month last year was the smallest in nine months, according to trade agency International Enterprise (IE) Singapore on Friday. The weak performance comes just as evidence of a fledgling recovery is growing.
Singapore came out of recession in the second quarter with growth of 20.4 per cent over the previous three months, according to flash estimates based mainly on April and May numbers.
The brighter figures announced earlier this week marked the first expansion in a year, prompting the Government to raise its growth forecast for this year. The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) now expects the economy to shrink by 4 per cent to 6 per cent instead of the 6 per cent to 9 per cent decline predicted in April.
But economists say Friday's export numbers underscore the fact that many of Singapore's trading partners are facing tough times, and that uncorking the champagne is premature.
On a year-on-year basis, non-oil domestic exports to most of Singapore's trading markets fell last month. The largest contributors to the decline was the European Union, with exports down 36.2 per cent. Malaysia (-23.5 per cent) and Japan (-22.4 per cent) were not much better.
IE Singapore data showed that electronics exports contracted by 21 per cent last month compared with the same period last year. Non-electronics shipments, which include pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals, fell by 4.6 per cent.
Read the full story in Saturday's edition of The Straits Times
