(From Reuters)
Profits earned by Chinese industrial companies rose 11.1 percent in March from a year earlier, adding to signs that the country’s economic slowdown may be bottoming out.
Industrial profits rose to 561.24 billion yuan ($86.50 billion) in March, the National Bureau of Statistics(NBS) said on its website on Wednesday.
That brought total first-quarter profits to 1.34 trillion yuan, up 7.4 percent from a year earlier and improving from a 4.8 percent rise in the January-February period.
The data covers large enterprises with annual revenue of more than 20 million yuan from their main operations.
The first-quarter gains were largely led by chemical companies and agricultural and food processing companies, which posted 20.8 percent and 12.1 percent growth compared with the same period a year earlier. Read more