Chart of the Day: Manufacturing sector outlook remains sour

Businesses are only optimistic on transport engineering and biomedical manufacturing clusters.

This chart from UOB shows that the general manufacturing, precision engineering and electronics segments have overall pessimistic views for the rest of the year.

The report added that Singapore’s external-oriented industries, especially in key manufacturing sectors as well as financial and business services, are likely the clusters that could drag economic growth should US-China trade relations worsen further.

In addition, Enterprise Singapore earlier revealed that electronics’ NODX extended a steep decline after falling further to 16.3% MoM in April.

Electronic NODX declined 16.3% MoM which narrows the 26.7% contraction in March. ICs, disk media products and parts of ICs shrunk 21.2%, 31.3% and 51.7%, respectively, contributing the most to the decline in electronic NODX.

On the other hand, the transport engineering and biomedical manufacturing segments have a more positive outlook about their business trajectory.