BEIJING–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.
Profits earned by Chinese industrial firms in the first two months dropped 38.3 percent from a year earlier to 410.7 billion yuan ($58.15 billion), 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.
