Singapore factory output growth slows to 3.4% in September despite AI-driven demand
The precision engineering cluster recorded the largest growth in September.
Singapore's manufacturing output growth decelerated to 3.4% in September, despite a surge in demand for artificial intelligence-related products. The Economic Development Board reported this in a data release on October 26th. This marked a significant drop from the 15.4% expansion seen in August and was well below the 7.1% forecast by economists in a Bloomberg poll.
The decline was primarily due to a slowdown in electronics output and a sharp contraction in pharmaceutical production. Electronics output growth moderated, while pharmaceutical production contracted sharply. However, precision engineering saw a significant growth of 31% in September, driven by increased production of semiconductor equipment and other industrial goods.
The electronics cluster saw a 5.7% growth, with the infocomms and consumer electronics, and computer peripherals and data storage segments expanding the most at 29% and 21.3% respectively. The transport engineering cluster also grew by 10.6%, with land transport seeing the largest increase at 31.4%. Aerospace production also grew by 16.3%.
On the downside, biomedical manufacturing saw the largest contraction at 32.8%, largely driven by the pharmaceuticals sector, which saw a 65.9% decline. The medical technology segment also fell by 1.7% due to weaker export demand. The chemicals cluster saw a 4.6% decline, while the other chemicals and petrochemicals segments contracted by 19.4% and 24.3% respectively.
Overall, the food, beverages and tobacco segment saw the strongest growth of 11% due to higher production of beverage and dairy products, while commercial printing also expanded by 7.6%.
Written by urgent.news from Straits Times Business's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
