Singapore’s industrial production slowed down sharply in December. On a year-on-year basis, the manufacturing output rose 2.7 percent, a sharp slowdown from prior month’s year-on-year rise of 7.6 percent and below consensus expectations of a rise of 4.4 percent. Stripping biomedical manufacturing, output dropped 1.8 percent. Sequentially, manufacturing output fell 5.6 percent, as compared with November’s rise of 3.1 percent and consensus expectations of 5.4 percent. Excluding biomedical manufacturing output dropped 6.7 percent. For the whole of 2018, manufacturing out grew 7.2 percent year-on-year.
Delving into details, biomedical manufacturing output rose 29.9 percent year-on-year, mainly driving the headline rate. Pharmaceuticals output grew 41.2 percent with higher production of active pharmaceutical ingredients and biological products. In all, biomedical manufacturing cluster’s output was up 8.1 percent in 2018.
The transport engineering output rose 23.7 percent year-on-year. Within this category, the marine & offshore engineering segment grew 31.8 percent, driven by a higher level of work done in offshore projects. The aerospace segment rose 22.3 percent with more repair and maintenance activities from commercial airlines. The transport engineering cluster rose 14.4 percent year-on-year in 2018.
Chemicals output dropped 1.4 percent year-on-year in December. For the whole of 2018, the chemicals cluster’s output was up 4.8 percent year-on-year. The output of general manufacturing also dropped in the month by 5.7 percent year-on-year. The fall was mainly driven by printing segment that dropped 7.2 percent and the food, beverages & tobacco segment that fell 9.6 percent because of output in beverage products. The output of general manufacturing cluster rose 0.3 percent in the whole of 2018.
The output of electronics fell 6.8 percent in the month year-on-year. The infocomms & consumer electronics and other electronic modules & components segments rose 12 percent 6.6 percent, respectively, while the remainder of the electronic segments shrank. For the whole of 2018, the electronics cluster rose 8.1 percent year-on-year.
