Hopes of a smooth recovery in Singapore’s manufacturing sector in the second half of the year may continue to be elusive as underlying growth momentum remains sluggish, NewsNow reported. Singapore’s manufacturing sector contracted for the fifth straight month in June, with industrial output shrinking 4.4% on a year-on-year basis, due to broad-based declines in all clusters save chemicals. Excluding biomedical output, industrial production would have contracted 5.3%. DBS Internet Banking economist Irvin Seah calls this “an utterly poor outcome” which is very much lower than the projection of about 1.8% on-year decline projected in recent advance gross domestic product estimates for Q2 2015.
