NBS: China industrial firms' Q1 profits slip 21% YoY

Chinese sizable industrial firms' gross profits totaled Yuan 1.52 trillion ($218.9 billion) in the first quarter of this year, or having declined by 21.4% on year, according to the latest data released by the country's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on April 27.

As for March, these industrial firms' gross profits slid by 19.2% on year, but the pace slowed down by 3.7 percentage points from the prior two months, mainly driven by "better macroeconomic performance and a recovery in market demand", said Sun Xiao, NBS's statistician. "The decline in industrial firms' profits