Manufacturing sector likely to drive Singapore’s economic growth this year

The Singaporean manufacturing sector is expected to mainly drive the economic growth in 2017, according to an OCBC research report. The country’s manufacturing output rose sharply in March by 10.2 percent year-on-year and 5 percent sequentially. Meanwhile, the figure for February was downwardly revised to 10.2 percent.

For the first quarter of 2017, Singapore’s manufacturing sector grew 8 percent year-on-year, as compared with the flash estimate of 6.6 percent year-on-year. This is expected to stimulate the country’s first quarter headline GDP growth from the estimated 2.5 percent year-on-year to 2.7 percent year-on-year.

The electronics sector mainly outperformed, rising 37.7 percent, helped by semiconductors, other electronics modules and components and data storage. Meanwhile, the transport engineering weakened in the month due to decline in the marine and offshore. Stripping biomedical manufacturing, output rose 12.4 percent year-on-year in March and 12.6 percent in the first quarter of 2017.

The March data for manufacturing sector provides certain upside risk to the 2017 economic growth projection of 2 percent to 2.5 percent year-on-year, stated, Selena Ling, Head of Treasury Research & Strategy, OCBC Bank.