SINGAPORE - Singapore's non-oil domestic exports in January grew a much better-than-expected 4.3 per cent from a year earlier, higher than the 2.3 per cent increase in December, on a rise in both electronic and non-electronic shipments, International Enterprise (IE) Singapore reported on Tuesday.

Non-oil domestic exports (NODX) last month were expected to have risen 1.9 per cent from a year earlier, according to the median forecast in the survey of 11 economists by Reuters.

On a year-on-year basis, NODX to all of the top 10 markets, except Indonesia and Japan, rose last month. The top three contributors to the NODX expansion were the EU 28, Hong Kong and China.

On a month-on-month seasonally adjusted basis, NODX rose by 1.6 per cent in January 2015, in contrast to the previous month's 0.2 per cent decrease, due to the expansion in non-electronic NODX which outweighed the decline in electronic NODX.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the level of NODX reached $14.2 billion in January 2015, higher than the $14.0 billion registered in the previous month.

The increase in electronic domestic exports was largely due to ICs (+32.0 per cent), diodes & transistors (+31.7 per cent) and disk media products (+15.8 per cent).

The rise in non-electronic NODX was led by pharmaceuticals (+25.9 per cent), pumps (+210.1 per cent) and non-electric engines & motors (+356.3 per cent)