China’s Industrial Profits Rose in May After Slumping

(Bloomberg) -- Profits of China’s industrial companies rose in May after a sharp deterioration the previous month.

• Industrial firms’ profits increased 1.1% in May from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement on Thursday. Revisions to the data series mean that economists have raised doubts about the reliability of the release

Key Insights

• China’s economy continued to weaken in June, as reflected in a Bloomberg Economics gauge aggregating the earliest available indicators of business conditions and market sentiment. That underscored how important it will be for President Xi Jinping to push forward talks with President Donald Trump this week and avoid tariffs on the rest of the nation’s exports to the U.S.
• To the end of May, companies’ leverage ratio declined by 0.6 percentage points to 56.8%, according to the statement. The leverage ratio at state-owned enterprises went down by 1.4 percentage points to 58.3% in May.

Get More

• Industrial profits declined by 3.7% in April, the worst reading of the data since 2015

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.