JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s trade surplus in September beat forecasts at $4.99 billion as both exports and imports grew at a slower pace than expected, data from the Bureau of Trade showed on Monday. statistics.
A Reuters poll predicted a surplus of $4.84 billion in September, down from a surplus of $5.76 billion the previous month.
Southeast Asia’s largest economy has seen an export boom due to high global commodity prices.
In the first nine months of 2022, the resource-rich country recorded a surplus of $39.87 billion, already higher than its record surplus of $39.73 billion in 2006.
However, some commodity prices have started to moderate.
Exports in September rose 20.28% year on year to $24.80 billion, against a 27.91% rise forecast by analysts in a Reuters poll.
There was a month-over-month decline of US$1.4 billion in the value of shipments of palm oil products to US$2.4 billion, reflecting lower prices as well as shipping volumes.
This decline was tempered by shipments of coal, Indonesia’s main commodity, which remained strong at US$4.2 billion.
Coal prices remained near a record high last month, while exports to China rose 41.2% on a monthly basis to $949.08 million, which analysts said was related to the demand before the Communist Party Congress.
There has also been a significant increase in coal shipments to European Union countries.
Indonesia’s imports rose 22.02 percent in September to $19.81 billion, against a growth forecast of 31.48 percent according to the survey.
Irman Faiz, an economist at Bank Danamon in Jakarta, said the surplus reaffirmed that the rupiah’s fundamentals were strong, even as the currency continued to depreciate due to capital outflows linked to the US monetary tightening.
The rupiah extended its losses after the trade data, hitting a new low since April 2020. It was trading at 15,480 a dollar at 05:25 GMT.
“We believe that monetary policy makers need to accelerate the pace of tightening, in order to seize the opportunity from favorable IDR fundamentals,” Faiz said.
“We expect BI (Bank Indonesia) to make another 50 basis point hike at this week’s meeting,” he said, expecting that to be followed by further hikes. by 150 basis points until the second quarter of 2023.
(Reporting by Gayatri Suroyo, Stefanno Sulaiman and Fransiska Nangoy; Editing by Ed Davies, Martin Petty)