Singapore's Non-Oil Exports Jump 24.2% in July as AI-Driven Chip Demand Powers a Fourth Straight Month of 20%+ Growth

Singapore's export engine kept accelerating in July, with non-oil domestic exports (NODX) — the headline gauge of goods Singapore actually produces and ships abroad, stripped of oil and re-exported goods — rising 24.2% from a year earlier. That's up from June's already-strong 20.8% gain, and it's the fourth straight month NODX growth has topped 20%, according to Enterprise Singapore, the statutory board that compiles the city-state's trade data.

The desk's read is that this is fundamentally an AI hardware story, not a broad-based trade recovery. Electronics NODX more than doubled, up 112% year-on-year, with the surge concentrated in a narrow set of products tied directly to AI infrastructure buildout: disk media, or storage products (up 339.1%, S$1.6 billion) and integrated circuits, or chips (up 84.5%, S$1.4 billion). Strip electronics out, and non-electronic NODX actually fell 2.3% — the second straight monthly decline — dragged down by pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, and food preparations.

Non-oil re-exports, goods that pass through Singapore's ports without local processing, rose 51.3%, and total merchandise trade — all imports and exports combined — climbed 38.6% for the month. The scale of the gain was enough for Enterprise Singapore to sharply revise its full-year 2026 NODX forecast upward, to 14-16% growth from a prior 3-5% range — one of the larger single-revision jumps to its annual guidance in recent years.