The Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry recently released advanced estimates of GDP numbers for the city-state for the second quarter of 2020. The data demonstrated the brutal economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, GDP plummeted by some 41.2 percent quarter-on-quarter compared to the same quarter a year earlier. It is slightly worse than the forecasts of economists for a 37.4% contraction. In the second quarter covering the period from April 7 to June 1 Singapore was on a lockout to avoid the spread of the virus resulting in economic activity going into hibernation with workplaces closed except for critical services.
Adjustments can be made as detailed data is available but generally, the advance forecasts have been fairly reliable. The economy of Singapore is economically dependent and the significant downturn in global demand and trade is reflected in the way its economy has performed. Also here one can verify acra company.
As the first Asian country to announce its GDP figures for the second quarter of this year, this could give a hint of the devastating effect that the COVID-19 pandemic may have had on similar economies in the rest of Asia. Because of the worsening health crisis, the International Monetary Fund warned last month of a steeper downturn in global economic activity than it had previously forecast. In its updated forecast, global production is projected to fall by 4.9 percent compared to a 3.0 percent contraction estimated in April.
On a quarterly basis, total GDP in Singapore dropped by 12.6 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, with manufacturing being the bright spark driven by solid growth in the biomedical field. Production from the manufacturing sector increased by 2.5 percent in the second quarter, but it was still smaller than the 8.2 percent rise in the previous quarter.
The manufacturing sector shrank 23.1 percent on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis quarter-on-quarter, a sharp turnaround from the 45.5 percent growth in the previous quarter. In addition to biomedical manufacturing, the economy in the wealthy island republic shrank across all sectors including chemicals, transportation, engineering, and other manufacturing clusters.
Construction, where most staff are housed in the virus ramping through dormitories, saw the steepest fall in production with an annualized quarter-on-quarter decrease of a whopping 95.7 percent. This translates into a decline of 54.7 percent compared to Q1. To date, the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has infected more than 14 million people worldwide and claimed more than 600,000 lives worldwide as of the end of last week.
Nearly 48,000 cases were reported in Singapore, with approximately 95 percent of cases affecting migrant workers and a total of 27 deaths as a direct result of the virus. The services sector contracted the most severely affected industries such as retail, food, and beverage (F&B), hospitality, and air transport 13.6 percent year-on-year for the quarter.
It is chaired by influential lawyer Chandra Mohan Rethnam, who is a partner in one of Singapore's best-known law firms. One of the first things that SICCI has done is to link up with Enterprise Singapore to set up the SG Together Enhancing Enterprise Resilience (STEER) program aimed at helping companies tide the challenges posed by COVID-19.
This also supports Singapore 's growth as a trading hub. As stated by Connected To India, the SICCI task force has been working to provide incentives to Indian SMEs to access various government funding and support packages for small businesses in Singapore.
They set up a call center and trained a group of people to familiarize themselves with the various government schemes so that they could offer guidance to small and medium-sized businesses who were uncertain as to how best to get support.
When business slowed down to a trickle and with cash flow and financial management in the minds of these small and medium-sized companies, the task force connected to major banks and financial institutions to provide direct assistance.
To allow this, the SICCI is reaching out to the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to help Indian SMEs digitize their businesses using the various grants made available by the Singapore government to SMEs that digitalize and implement e-payment and e-commerce systems.