To Selena Ling, chief economist and head of global markets research and strategy at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), the “unexpected” contraction of February’s NODX came as a disappointment. However, as the Lunar New Year holidays fell in January last year but happened in February this year, Ling deems it to be more appropriate to look at the average of the performances in January and February.
Singapore’s non-oil domestic exports (NODX) fell by 0.1% y-o-y and 4.8% m-o-m to $14.2 billion in February. During the month, non-electronic NODX fell by 1.5% y-o-y with food preparations, specialty chemicals and electrical circuit apparatus contributing the most to the declines at 23.5%, 19.7% and 36.9% respectively.
Meanwhile, electronic NODX rose by 5.2% thanks to integrated circuits (ICs), personal computers (PCs) and parts of ICs contributed the most with y-o-y growths of 15.9%, 26.2% and 54.8% respectively.
