Chart of the Day: This is the sorry state of Singapore’s manufacturing sector

Production fell for 7 straight months.

The sector has been gasping for air for over half a year now, and the numbers this August show no sign of letting up.

According to OCBC, in order to dodge a technical recession, September’s IP would have to expand by 0.1% YoY, which would require a significant pick-up in the electronics and biomedical output.

“Both electronics and pharmaceuticals output fell 10.9% yoy and 6.3% yoy respectively. Other drags included transport engineering (-14.5%), especially marine & offshore engineering (- 26.7%), precision engineering (-9.2%), and general manufacturing (-2.0%), which outweighed the chemicals cluster (+3.7%),” OCBC said.

“July’s IP was also revised down from an initial estimate of -6.1% yoy (+1.00% mom sa) to -6.4% yoy (+0.7% mom sa). This brought Jan-Aug IP growth to -4.5% yoy versus +4.7% yoy for the same period last year,” OCBC added.