Exports rose last month, mainly due to a jump in the volatile pharmaceuticals sector from a low base.

Non-oil domestic exports (Nodx) increased 9.7 per cent last month from a year earlier, driven by a 12.8 per cent surge in non-electronics exports that included a 174.3 per cent gain in pharmaceuticals, said Enterprise Singapore (ESG) yesterday.

This is the third straight month of year-on-year gains for Nodx, despite a gloomy economic climate caused by the pandemic.

Analysts polled by Bloomberg had forecast a 5 per cent decline in Nodx, after exports climbed 3.1 per cent in February and 17.6 per cent in March. But even after another surprising rise, many are still not convinced about the sustainability of the upswing.

Pharmaceuticals, which spearheaded the growth, accounts for only 13 per cent of manufacturing and 10 per cent of exports.

DBS Bank senior economist Irvin Seah said: "While it may be tempting to conclude that the worst could be over, we need to take the latest set of figures with a pinch of salt."

Medical supplies to fight the outbreak were in high demand globally, while a low base for the sector in April last year may have exaggerated the increase.

Pharmaceutical exports are typically volatile in nature and subject to fluctuations across months, ESG added.

Non-monetary gold and food preparations, which rose 25 per cent and 66 per cent respectively, may have also benefited from the pandemic.

Ms Selena Ling, OCBC Bank's head of treasury research and strategy, said the spike in gold exports is likely due to the bouts of risk aversion arising from Covid-19, United States-China bilateral tensions and central bankers' caution over the economic outlook.

Gold's benchmark price recently hit a seven-year high of US$1,755 per ounce in London.

Food preparation shipments have picked up amid supply chain disruptions and subsequent restocking worldwide, Ms Ling said.

To measure the impact of Covid-19 on external demand, Nomura International excluded pharmaceuticals and gold exports to show that Nodx actually dropped last month for the first time in three months.

Mr Euben Paracuelles, an economist at Nomura, calculated that Nodx last month - without the contributions from the two sectors - fell 5.6 per cent year on year from a gain of 2.3 per cent in March.

Sectors that did not do well last month included electronics, which represents a large chunk of manufacturing output and jobs.

ESG data showed shipments of electronic goods slipped 0.6 per cent year on year last month, reversing from a 5.8 per cent gain in March.

Contributing the most to the decline in electronics exports were personal computers, diodes and transistors, and disk drives.

The performance of petrochemicals exports continued to worsen.

On a month-on-month seasonally adjusted basis, overall Nodx fell 5.8 per cent last month, after March's 12.8 per cent expansion.

Both electronics and non-electronics domestic exports decreased month on month.

However, there were some silver linings in the trade data.

Mr Barnabas Gan, an economist at UOB Group, said the low base effect from pharmaceutical shipments may prove to be a boon for Nodx for most of this year as they fell from June to November last year, after recording a 28.5 per cent expansion in May last year.

"(These) low-base effects, coupled with an increased demand for medical goods, may be the lynchpin of growth for Singapore's non-electronics Nodx," he said.

Maybank analyst Chua Hak Bin saw the March and April export data as a sign that manufacturing may escape recession.

"The circuit breaker measures may be sparing manufacturing and exports from the full brunt of the lockdown, as they are largely seen as essential services," he said.

Singapore's exports to its top markets grew as a whole last month, though shipments to China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand declined.

The largest contributors to the Nodx growth were the US (+124 per cent), the European Union (+106.8 per cent) and Japan (+81.1 per cent).