Profits at China's industrial firms slumped in the first two months of the year to their lowest in at least a decade, with the mining, manufacturing and power sectors all seeing sharp falls as a virus epidemic battered China's economy, EDNews reports citing Aljazeera.
Profits earned by Chinese industrial firms in January and February dropped 38.3 percent from a year earlier to 410.7 billion yuan ($58.15bn), worsening from a 6.3-percent fall seen in December last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data showed.
It marked the steepest decline in data going back to 2010.
The reading combines the results for January and February to exclude distortions caused by the week-long Lunar New Year.
Businesses, however, were closed for much longer than the usual one week as the coronavirus outbreak escalated just as the holiday began. Widespread restrictions on transportation and personal travel, as well as mass quarantine, delayed their reopening for weeks.
An overwhelming majority of industries saw their profits decline, it said, from automobiles to chemicals.
China's central bank cut the cash that banks must hold as reserves earlier this month for the second time this year, injecting 550 billion yuan ($77.9bn) to help the economy cushion the impact from the health crisis, following an 800-billion-yuan ($113bn) reserve requirement rate cut in January.
The government has also stepped up fiscal support, including more funding to battle the virus fallout, tax waivers, cuts in social insurance fees and subsidies for firms.
For the first two months, profits at state-owned industrial firms dropped 32.9 percent on year, while private-sector profits fell 36.6 percent.
Liabilities at industrial firms grew 5.3 percent on year at end-February, versus a 5.4 percent increase as of end-2019.