Singapore’s exports rose for a seventh month in May as a surge in electronics shipments offset declining overseas sales of pharmaceuticals.

Non-oil domestic exports climbed 24.4% from a year earlier, after a revised 30% gain in April, the trade promotion agency said in a statement in Singapore today. The median forecast of 10 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for an increase of 25.7%.

 

Singapore has raised its growth forecast twice this year as overseas demand for its computer chips and manufactured goods recovers from last year’s slump. The island’s economy expanded an annualized 38.6% from the previous three months in the first quarter.

 

Higher exports in May “will set the stage for an encouraging outcome in production as well as gross domestic product” for this quarter, Irvin Seah, an economist at DBS Group Holdings Ltd. in Singapore, said before the report.

 

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract manufacturer of chips, said this week global chip- industry sales will climb almost 30% in 2010, higher than an April forecast of 22%.