FX.co ★ China’s industrial profits soar by 31.5%

Earnings of Chinese industrial companies surged by 31.5% in January and February from a year before. Meanwhile, manufacturing business operations of the ruling Communist Party accounted for 50% of a 234.3 billion yuan gain in profits.

In the first two months of the year, industrial firms posted profits worth 1 trillion yuan, for the first time in history. This was due to a 13.9% rise in overall industrial revenue to 17.4 trillion yuan ($2.53 trillion), which exceeded a 13.3% increase in costs.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), state-run enterprises contributed 233.63 billion yuan of earnings, twice as more as a year before. That accounted for 23% of overall industrial profits, up from 13% in the same period a year ago.

In the meantime, coal and oil exploration revealed a decline, while profits in the steel industry rose by over 20 times.

Analysts note that the turnaround in the producer price index (PPI) in the second half of the previous year was critical to the raw materials sector. The PPI advanced by 7.3% in January and February 2017.

According to the NBS, the coal mining, ferrous metal smelting, petroleum exploration and refining sectors, as well as the chemical production together made even greater contribution to the profits in the first two months of 2017 than in December. Experts say this should be viewed as a restorative normalization of profits.