Chinese industrial companies' profits declined 1.4% from a year earlier to 672 billion yuan ($1.04 billion) in November.
In the January to November period profits earned by China’s industrial firms totaled to 5.5 trillion yuan, down 1.9% on a yearly basis. During the first 11 months of the year, state-owned industrial companies’ profits plunged 23% to 1.008 trillion yuan from the same period last year.
The mining sector saw the biggest decline over the reporting period, with profits falling 56.5% to 251.65 billion yuan from a year earlier. Meanwhile, profits of manufacturing businesses rose 3.4% to 4.79 trillion yuan. Revenues of Chinese energy companies producing and distributing electricity, gas and water increased 14.7% to 486.82 billion yuan.
"The November industrial profit data matched earlier output data and they showed some signs of stabilizing," said Zhou Hao, China economist at Commerzbank in Singapore, adding the figures were slightly better than market expectations.
