’03 Maine exports set record Industry’s growth eighth-fastest in U.S.

PORTLAND – Some of Maine’s traditional natural resources-based industries have stepped up their exports, making up for the falling fortunes of the state’s semiconductor industry.

The shift has helped propel Maine’s international trade to a strong performance, with the state’s exports growing 10.9 percent last year to reach a record $2.2 billion.

That pace of growth is the eighth-fastest in the country, and it has picked up even more this year, although the more recent figures are skewed by the inclusion of the two oil drilling rigs completed in Portland Harbor.

Maine’s exports are slightly ahead of neighboring New Hampshire, which sent $1.86 billion worth of goods overseas in 2002, compared to $1.97 billion in Maine that year, according to the Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research.

The state’s trade performance is even more impressive if the semiconductor numbers are stripped away, said Richard Coyle, president of the Maine International Trade Center.

Without semiconductors factored in, Coyle said, Maine exports leaped by 37 percent from 1998 to 2003, a time when the economies in the United States and overseas were languishing and a strong dollar made U.S. products more expensive abroad.

Semiconductors remain an important part of the state’s economy, thanks to two plants in South Portland: Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semiconductor, which ship hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of semiconductors out of the country.

But for the past six years, while the semiconductor industry has nose-dived, some of Maine’s older natural-resources-based industries have stepped up their exports and taken up some of the slack.

Some of the strongest growth has been in natural resource-based products, Coyle said, such as pulp and paper and seafood.

“Those are traditional, mature industries – which most people say are in decline – but they’re the ones that are growing,” Coyle said.

Coyle cites the Domtar pulp and paper mill in Woodland as an example of a mature industry leading the surge in exports.

With the semiconductor industry starting to recover, he added, “in 2004 and 2005, you’re going to see very strong export statistics.”