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Taiwan’s tech production went boom! in March

Possibly picking up China's slack. Fingers crossed for more than that!

Taiwan’s posted its monthly Industrial Production Indexes for March 2020 and they contain some nice-looking numbers.

The indexes measure the weight of activity compared to past performance, rather than value of activity.

Overall industrial production was up 10.41 percent across all sectors, with manufacturing up 11.09 percent. And in the sectors most likely to impact supply of the things Reg readers care about the most, performance was strong as shown in the table below.

Sector/Comparison Integrated circuits Liquid crystal panel and components Computers, Electronic and optical products
Compared with Last Month (%) 13.26 38.83 28.33
Compared with the same Month of last year (%) 40.26 -1.1 22.16
Jan.-Current Month Compared with the Same Period of Last Year (%) 38.77 -6.58 13.93

The data dump is offered without explanation, but The Register can hazard a guess at what’s going on here: when China locked down and its industries stopped producing, buyers turned to Taiwan for their supplies and did so because the nation had capacity to help.

That Taiwan did very well in its effort to contain the novel coronavirus can’t have hurt. The country started to look for possible carriers in early January and has recorded just 427 COVID-19 cases at the time of writing. The country even seems set to allow travel over the May Day long weekend.

If the production spike is also a sign of a general economic bounce-back as the world gets a handle on the pandemic, all the better! ®

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