China’s industrial profits up 10.3% in 2018

Profits of China’s major industrial firms maintained steady growth last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Jan 28.

Combined profits at industrial firms with the annual revenue of more than 20 million yuan (about $2.96 million) each reached 6.64 trillion yuan last year, up 10.3 percent year on year.

The 2018 profit growth is lower than the 21-percent expansion for 2017, but still remained on a steady growth track, according to NBS statistician He Ping.

Profits fell 1.9 percent year-on-year last December, down further from a drop of 1.8 percent in November.

State-owned players saw profits up 12.6 percent year-on-year in 2018, compared with 45.1-percent growth in 2017, while private firms’ profit growth accelerated from 11.7 percent in 2017 to 11.9 percent last year.

Profits in 32 of the 41 sectors surveyed rose compared with a year earlier.

The mining sector’s profits expanded 40.1 percent year-on-year, with the petroleum and natural gas mining subsector posting a robust growth of 440 percent.

The manufacturing sector’s earnings grew 8.7 percent year-on-year.

Among the nine sectors with shrinking profits, non-ferrous metals smelting and rolling decreased 9 percent in profits, while automobile manufacturing fell by 4.7 percent year-on-year.