By Faith Hung and Emily Chan
TAIPEI- Taiwan export orders fell short of expectations for September, losing some steam ahead of the year’s end as it remained buoyed by the artificial intelligence wave but ran into faltering demand from top trading partner China.
Export orders last month rose 4.6 percent to $53.79 billion from a year earlier, the economics ministry said on Monday. That missed both the 6.8 percent gain forecast in a Reuters poll and August’s 9.1 percent expansion, but marked the seventh month in a row of expansion.
Orders for goods from Taiwan, home to tech giants such as chip manufacturer TSMC are a bellwether of global technology demand.
Businesses continued to expand thanks to AI, high-performance and cloud computing, a ministry statement said.
The ministry expects export orders momentum to be sustained as new applications keep rolling out, boosting demand for semiconductors and servers, the statement said. Consumer electronics products will enter the traditional hot season in the second half of the year, it added.
The ministry said it expects export orders in October will increase between 1.2 percent and 5.0 percent year-on-year. – Reuters
