This photo taken on July 28, 2025 shows a view of China Changan Automobile Group's digital and intelligent factory for the new energy vehicle AVATR in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality. Photo: Xinhua

China's industrial sector has shown notable signs of recovery, with profits reversing a downward trend by growing 0.9 percent year-on-year in the first eight months of 2025, official data showed on Saturday. The growth is largely thanks to stepped-up macro-policies, the building of a unified national market, and a low base of comparison from the same period last year.

The combined profit of large industrial enterprises - or those with annual revenue from their core business of at least 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) - reached 4.69 trillion yuan in the January-August period, up 0.9 percent year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said in a statement on Saturday. It also came after a decrease of 1.7 percent year-on-year in the January-July period.

The latest data has reversed a continuous year-on-year decline in industrial enterprises' cumulative profits that has been seen since May, NBS statistician Yu Weining noted.

The equipment manufacturing sector has played an important role in the recovery, Yu said, with profits for large companies in the sector rising by 7.2 percent year-on-year. This contributed 2.5 percentage points to the overall profit growth for large industrial enterprises, making it one of the most significant drivers for industrial profit recovery. Among the eight sub-sectors within equipment manufacturing, significant gains were seen in railways, shipbuilding, aerospace and electronics, according to the NBS.

The relatively rapid growth of profits in the high-tech manufacturing sector underscores the effective transformation and upgrading of China's industrial structure, with the nurturing of new quality productive forces making progress, Hu Qimu, a deputy secretary-general of Forum 50 for Digital-Real Economies Integration, told the Global Times on Saturday.

"In addition, China has stepped up efforts to stimulate domestic demand, including promoting equipment upgrades and consumer goods trade-ins. These policies have greatly boosted downstream consumer goods demand, and have driven continuous profit recovery for large industrial enterprises," Hu said.

A meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee on July 30 called for efforts to accelerate the cultivation of emerging pillar industries with global competitiveness, and to promote the deep integration and development of sci-tech and industrial innovation.

The Private Sector Promotion Law, which aims to support high-quality development by the private economy, took effect in May. It has also played a positive role in boosting confidence among industrial enterprises and consolidating the foundations for an industrial economic recovery, Li Changan, a professor with the Academy of China Open Economy Studies at the University of International Business and Economics, told the Global Times.

In the first eight months, profits of in the raw material manufacturing sector grew by 22.1 percent year-on-year, accelerating by 10 percentage points compared to January-July, and contributing 2.5 percentage points to the overall profit growth for large industrial enterprises, according to the NBS.

In addition, profits in consumer goods manufacturing reversed a 2.2 percent decline in January-July to post 1.4 percent growth in the January-August period, the data showed.

It's worth noting that industrial enterprises of all sizes saw improved profitability, with private enterprises demonstrating particularly notable acceleration, Yu said.

China's industrial economy is currently maintaining steady operation, with stable production growth and continuous structural optimization. Recent efforts to promote industry self-regulation and capacity governance in key sectors will also contribute to profit growth for industrial enterprises, Hu said, by encouraging innovation and healthy competition.
Looking ahead, against the backdrop of a difficult and complex external environment and insufficient domestic market demand, efforts will continue to be made to further expand domestic demand, deepen the building of a unified national market, standardize corporate competition, and create more favorable conditions for sustained recovery of industrial enterprise profits, Yu said.