A taste of its own medicine: Singapore banks on pharmaceuticals to boost ailing exports

We're sorry, tech producers.

Singapore’s increased capacity to produce pharmaceutical drugs has boosted exports to the US and Europe, despite Singapore’s lackluster non-oil domestic exports situation.

Moody’s Analytics says that the global shift away from PCs is hurting Singapore’s tech producers, as are more cost-effective and larger-scale producers elsewhere in the region.

Singapore’s manufactured exports continue to diversify away from electronics as exports of semiconductors, disk drives, and other PC components are falling at double-digit year-on-year rates, and this is likely to continue, adds Moody’s Analytics.

Meanwhile, DBS thinks that the manufacturing sector is also weighed down by structural challenges. According to them, domestic restructuring has resulted in a labour crunch, which is crimping export competitiveness and affecting the performance of exports and manufacturing.