Profits of China's major industrial firms grew 13.6 percent year on year in the first 10 months of 2018, down from the 14.7-percent expansion for the January-September period, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.
Profit at 34 of the 41 sectors surveyed rose compared with one year earlier, unchanged from that for January-September, according to the NBS.
In October, combined profits at industrial firms with annual revenue of more than 20 million yuan (about 2.88 million U.S. dollars) rose 3.6 percent year on year to 548 billion yuan, 0.5 percentage points slower than that recorded in September.
According to the NBS, the sectors of steel, construction materials, oil and chemicals contributed 75.7 percent to the overall industrial profit increase.
By the end of October, the debt-asset ratios of major industrial firms dropped 0.5 percentage points from a year earlier to 56.7 percent.
