The growth came on the back of recovery in demand. Compared with the first five months of 2019, the figure represented a rise of 48%.
Statistics show that, in May alone, the profits of major industrial firms grew 36.4% in annual terms to 829.9 billion yuan ($11.4 billion). The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry saw profits skyrocket by 85.7% year-on-year in May, an increase of 23.6 percentage points from April.
A senior NBS statistician, Zhu Hong, cited by Xinhua News, said that nearly 70% of the 41 industrial sectors under the NBS measurement achieved a year-on-year increase in profits in May. Over 80% of the sectors’ profits exceeded the same period in 2019.
He noted, however, that profits were mainly concentrated in the upstream mining and raw-material manufacturing industries due to factors such as rising prices in bulk commodities. Meanwhile, the profit growth rate of private enterprises was lower than the average level of major industrial firms.
According to Zhu, efforts will be made to guide bulk commodity prices to return to the fundamentals of supply and demand, and to promote the sustainable recovery of the nation’s economy.
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