By Faith Hung and Emily Chan
TAIPEI (Reuters) – 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% to $53.79 billion from a year earlier, the economics ministry said on Monday. That missed both the 6.8% gain forecast in a Reuters poll and August’s 9.1% 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% and 5.0% year-on-year.
Taiwan’s orders in September for telecommunications products were up 7.0% from the prior year, while electronic products rose 10.5% from a year earlier.
But overall orders from China fell 3.6% versus a 2.6% expansion the prior month. Orders from the United States climbed 8.3%, versus an 11.2% gain in August.
Orders from Europe shed 4.2% in September after climbing 8.3% in August. From Japan, orders were up 9.8% last month, versus a rise of 2.1% in August.
(Reporting by Emily Chan and Faith Hung; Editing by Toby Chopra, Ben Blanchard and Mark Heinrich)
