Local manufacturing crippled by electronic cluster's structural demise

And volatile pharma can't pick up the slack.

Singapore's manufacturing sector continues to be crippled by the structural deterioration in the electronic cluster. After May's unexpectedly weak non-oil domestic exports (NODX) print, analysts warn that the country's export outlook will remain under pressure for the foreseeable future.

"The long-evident structural demise of the electronics cluster continued to weigh heavily and was compounded by weak non-chemicals, non-electronics shipments," said Philip McNicholas, ASEAN Economist, BNP Paribas Singapore.

This leaves Singapore in the the less-than-ideal position of relying on the notoriously volatile pharmaceuticals sector to underpin manufacturing growth, McNicholas added.

However, DBS senior economist Irvin Seah warned that pharmaceuticals will never be able to pick up the slack in manufacturing.

"The dip in pharmaceutical exports is a reminder that we can never count on the cluster to provide support on the external front. Volatility is the hallmark of the pharmaceutical sector and will continue to create swings in the overall export performance going forward," Seah said.

NODX posted a 0.2% decline in May, in contrast to the 2.2% year-on-year increase in the previous month and a wide miss from consensus expectations of a 2.3% year-on-year gain.

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