Singapore's manufacturing output rose by 5.1 percent in December last year over a year ago, according to the figures released by the Economic Development Board (EDB) on Thursday.

EDB said that the increase was spurred by high growth in the transport engineering and electronics clusters, which expanded by 32.9 percent and 20.7 percent respectively.

The output of the precision engineering cluster rose by 8.8 percent in last December over a year ago, while that of the chemicals cluster grew by 1.4 percent in the same month.

The output of the biomedical manufacturing cluster contracted by 23.9 percent in December 2005, and that of the general manufacturing industries dropped by 2.5 percent.

Total manufacturing output grew by 9.2 percent in 2005 as compared with 2004.

Source: Xinhua