Taiwan's monthly export orders report turns out to tell us more about what's going on in the rest of the world - particularly in China and electronics, of course - than it is to the near-term outlook for Taiwan's exports.
With that in mind, November's orders were interesting. They rose 13.4% yoy, which doesn't sound that great, considering that for most of the last last year we've got used to rises of 30-40%. But in fact this was a strong result for two reasons: first, November 2020 was the month at which the real rush to secure supplies of Taiwan's semicons broke into the open - with the highest yoy since 2010 - so it was a really tough base of comparison. And second, October's orders were genuinely weak, with the monthly movt down 1.6SDs from historic seasonal trends, and Nov's result corrected that, with a bounce 1.5SDs above trend. So, that relatively modest 13.4% yoy rise masks a genuinely strong result.
Electronics remains at the core of this: they word 17.9% yoy, and accounted for 31% of all orders. They were also up from 13.2% yoy in Oct. But headline number was helped along by basic metals +32.6% yoy, chemicals +41.1% and rubber/plastic products +22.6%, in turn helped along by high prices.
The other really striking thing was where demand is coming from: it's China and the rest of Asia which is now driving demand, whilst the West is sagging. China & HK was up 25.3% yoy and Asean up 33.7%, but Europe fell 2% yoy, Japan nudged up just 0.7% and the US was a lacklustre 10.8%.
