China's industrial profit surges 13.9% in March

A worker tests the temperature of molten steel at a steel plant in Dalian, Liaoning province.

The profits of China's major industrial firms surged by 13.9 percent in March, a drastic rebound compared to the 14-percent decline in January-February period, official data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed Saturday.

Production and sales of these firms picked up in March, with the aggregated industrial value added expanding by 8.5 percent year-on-year, 3.2 percentage points higher than that in the January-February period.

Operation revenue jumped by 13.7 percent year-on-year in March, 10.4 percentage points more than that in the January-February period.

Stabilizing prices served as another driver of the rebound, according to an NBS analysis. The producer prices rose 0.4 percent year-on-year in March, ending a decline for eight months in a row.

The purchasing prices for raw materials edged up 0.2 percent from a year ago, 0.1 percentage points higher than that in the January-February period.

Preliminary estimates showed that the price changes added 26.8 billion yuan to industrial profits in March, and the contribution of price changes to industrial profit growth rose by 4.5 percentage points from that in the January-February period, said senior statistician Zhu Hong from the NBS's Industrial Bureau.