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Earnings at China’s large industrial companies dropped in August amid slower sales and deepening producer-price deflation.
China’s industrial profits dropped 2% in August from a year earlier, after rising 2.6% in July, the National Bureau of Statistics of China said Friday.
Disruptions from strong storms last month also contributed to it, Zhu Hong, an economist with the bureau, said in a statement.
For the first eight months, industrial profits declined 1.7% on year, the bureau said.
China’s producer prices fell further into deflation last month, piling pressure on manufacturers that had been struggling with the prolonged trade war between China and the U.S., official data showed earlier.
Meanwhile, value-added industrial output grew at the slowest pace in more than a decade, underscoring sluggish demand and soft business confidence, the bureau said.
