China's industrial profits rose 14.4% year-on-year in September, beating the 12% forecast, but electronics and raw materials account for the entire gain. The PBOC held rates and added overnight cash as five-year bond yields touched 1.34%.
China Distilled estimates that excluding electronics, whose profits doubled on AI demand, January–September industrial profit growth would have been only about 6.5%. Source
Industrial profits at major firms rose 14.4% year-on-year in September, well ahead of the 12% Bloomberg Economics expected (August: 4.2%), the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported on Tuesday. The headline reads like a broad recovery. NBS's own breakdown says otherwise: one supply chain and one price index did the work. Cumulative profits for January to September reached CNY6.03tn, up 15.5% year-on-year (January to August: 15.7%). That growth rate is on NBS's comparable basis, which restates the prior year as the sample of firms with at least CNY20m in annual revenue changes. Divide by last year's published CNY5.37tn and you get roughly 12%.
