BALANCING ACT:Increasing demand for notebooks, solar products and chips helped offset the falling orders for machinery goods and precision instruments

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 22, 2016
By: Lauly Li / Staff reporter

The nation’s export orders fell 7.4 percent annually to US$27.67 billion last month, better than the government’s expectation of a 10 percent decline, due to improving demand for smartphones and laptops, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.

The latest results represent the 11th consecutive month of contraction in export orders, a critical economic indicator which sheds light on actual shipments one to three months ahead.

“The 7.4 percent annual decline was smaller than our previous forecast, mainly because of recovering demand for notebooks from European and US markets, and increasing orders for chips used in smartphones from China,” the ministry’s Department of Statistics Director-General Lin Lee-jen (林麗貞) told a news conference.     [FULL  STORY]