Consumer prices down 0.1% in April

Price gains in retail, electricity & gas, and services were all muted.

Consumer prices in April dipped 0.1% from last year, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) revealed. MAS Core Inflation edged down from 1.5% last month to 1.3%. The slower pace of price increases was seen across several major categories of the CPI basket.

Compared to last month, CPI-All items inflation was softer (from 0.2% to 0.1%) due to smaller increases in the prices of retail items, electricity & gas, and services, as well as a steeper fall in the cost of private road transport.

Retail prices rose by 0.9% in April, lower than the 1.3% increase in March, due to a steeper year-ago decline in the prices of personal care products, as well as a drop in the prices of recreation and entertainment goods. The cost of electricity & gas rose at a more moderate pace of 3.7% in April, compared to 6.2% in the previous month, reflecting a smaller increase in electricity tariffs.

Services inflation eased to 1.3% in April, from 1.4% in the preceding month. "A larger decline in telecommunication services fees and more modest increases in airfares and recreational & cultural services fees outweighed a stronger pickup in holiday expenses," MTI said.

Meanwhile, food inflation was stable at 1.4% in April, as a faster pace of increase in the cost of prepared meals was offset by a smaller increase in the prices of non-cooked food items.

The cost of private road transport fell by 0.8% in April, larger than the 0.6% decline in March. "This was due to a decline in car prices on a year-ago basis following a fall in Certificate of Entitlement (COE) premiums, which more than offset a steeper increase in petrol prices," MTI added.

Accommodation costs fell by 3.6% in April, larger than the 3.4% decline in the preceding month, as a smaller increase in the cost of housing maintenance & repairs more than offset a slower pace of decline in housing rentals. Meanwhile, CPI less imputed rentals on owner-occupied accommodation (CPI-ex OOA) inflation moderated to 0.9% in April, largely on account of a smaller increase in the prices of retail items and electricity & gas.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia