Singapore’s industrial production continued to decline at the start of the year, though at a slower-than-expected pace, preliminary figures from the Economic Development Board showed Friday.
Industrial production dropped 0.5 percent year-over-year in January, much slower than the 11.9 percent plunge in December. Economists had expected a 5.1 percent fall for the month.
Production has been falling since November 2014 and the latest rate of decrease was the weakest in this sequence.
Excluding biomedical manufacturing, output dipped 7.0 percent in January from a year ago.
Among components, output of the transport engineering cluster slumped 23.3 percent annually in January and that for precision engineering cluster slipped by 8.4 percent.
The general manufacturing industries cluster’s output fell 4.4 percent and the chemicals cluster’s output went down by 3.7 percent.
At the same time, the biomedical manufacturing cluster’s output expanded 28.9 percent and output of the electronics cluster grew by 1.7 percent, driven by higher production in the electronic modules & components and semiconductors segments.
On a monthly basis, industrial production climbed a seasonally adjusted 9.3 percent in January, in contrast to economists’ forecast for a 2.2 percent drop. It was the first decline in eight months.
The material has been provided by InstaForex Company – www.instaforex.com