Singapore’s gadget sales volume drops 2% in 2Q11

It is the only market in Southeast Asia which has fallen into the red.

The Technical Consumer Goods industry in Southeast Asian’s developing markets continues on its upward curve in quarter two this year, according to the retail audit findings from leading global market research company, GfK. Its latest reports revealed that the four key developing markets in the region— Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia registered between 6 and 38 percent growth over the same time period last year.

Indonesia continues to lead the pack with its healthy expansion of 38 percent. Trailing behind is Malaysia, which at 23 percent has successfully overtaken Vietnam as the market with the second highest growth this latest quarter, propelled by its strong performing Major Domestic Appliances (53%), Information Technology (26%), Telecommunication (33%), and Office Equipment & Consumables (42%) sectors. Thailand and Vietnam both achieved single-digit growth of nine and six percent respectively. Singapore is the only market which had fallen into the red (-2%)

“The Technical Consumer Goods sector in the region’s developing countries have generally been seeing improvement over the last few quarters, and the Indonesian market in particular, have consistently been reporting increasing quarterly growth,” observed Mr. Stanley Kee, Regional Commercial Director of GfK Asia. “The country’s good performance is driven by the excellent showings of the Consumer Electronics and Information Technology sectors which both registered over 20 percent growth, and particularly the Telecommunication sector, which expanded by a massive 71 percent!”

Among all the sectors of the industry that GfK Retail and Technology tracks, only the Major Domestic Appliances and Telecommunication sectors managed to remain in positive territory across all five markets—a trend that has remained consistent for the past four quarters for MDA, and past two quarters for Telecommunication. These two sectors also boast the two highest growth markets, with Telecommunication in Indonesia reporting 70 percent growth, and Malaysia’s MDA recording 53 percent.

“The growth spurt of the Telecommunication industry is clearly seen in the Southeast Asian developing markets which all have registered very strong performance—with even the lowest growth market of Vietnam reported a considerable 29 percent,” commented Mr. Kee. “We can foresee that with the continued rising adoption rate of consumers in these markets will play a significant role in boosting the overall technical consumer industry for the next few quarters,”concluded Mr. Kee.

The overall Singapore technical consumer goods market saw a marginal decline in sales in Q2 2011 compared to Q2 2010. This was due to negative growth rates in the Consumer Electronics (-5.3%), Information Technology(-3.4%) and Photo sectors (-1.8%) . On the bright side, the Small Domestic Appliances sector posted a healthy double-digit growth (29.2%) while the rest of the sectors recorded positive single digit growth.