COMPANIES are becoming more pessimistic about the economic outlook, according to the latest business expectation surveys released on Friday.

About six in 10 firms across the services and manufacturing sectors now believe things will get worse in the first half of this year.

The weak sentiment is broad-based, affecting all clusters within manufacturing, said the Economic Development Board, which polled about 390 firms between last month and this month.

In the other survey, most of the 1,400 services companies polled by the Singapore Department of Statistics also anticipate slower business, with the decline in global economic activity.

The most downbeat industries are computer peripherals, petroleum, and hotels, where 100 per cent of companies surveyed think there is no way to go but down. All the other sectors have at least a few firms who believe things will improve by June.

Generally, all manufacturing industries apart from biomedical manufacturing are predicting a drop in employment in the first quarter of this year.

This is because they think output will fall across the board, ranging from a 14 per cent decrease in food, beverages and tobacco production to a 100 per cent drop in some electronic modules and components.

Employment is also likely to fall for services firms. In almost every industry, ranging from wholesale and retail trade to financial and business services, there are more firms predicting cuts in employment than those anticipating more hires.