Profit growth in Chinese industrial enterprises slowed for a fifth month amid the ongoing US-China trade spat and a weakening domestic economy.
Industrial profits rose 4.1 per cent in September from a year earlier, versus a 9.2 per cent increase in August. Total profits for the month were 545.5 billion yuan ($78.6 billion), the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday.
The slowdown comes as industrial output growth and factory inflation decelerated last month from a year earlier. Profit for the first nine months rose 14.7 per cent from a year earlier to 4.97 trillion yuan.
“In the first nine months, 34 of 41 industrial sectors saw profit rising year-on-year,” the bureau said in a statement released with the data.
The official year-on-year growth rate for profits is increasingly being called into question this year for diverging from growth calculated from the nominal profit figures, which also come from the bureau.
