Chinese Enterprises Perform Steadily in 1st QtrThe Chinese economy has made a good beginning in the first quarter of the year, with signs of steady performance for most of the country's enterprises, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.According to figures the NBS released Thursday, the index measuring enterprise performance in January-March this year stood at 118.6 points, up 3.4 points on a year-on-year basis. The performance index for state-owned enterprises was 116.2 points, up 6.0 points from a year earlier, but 4.9 points lower than that for the fourth quarter of last year. Officials contributed the drop to the impact of the Spring Festival, a traditional festival that lasted seven days. Joint-stock companies and private enterprises showed encouraging signs, with their performance indexes rising by 4.3 points and 9.4 points, respectively, from the fourth quarter last year. With its performance index up 8.1 points year-on-year to 128.2 points, enterprises in the transportation, storage and telecommunications sector surpassed manufacturing enterprises for the first time and began to lead all other trades. Construction enterprises, also affected by the traditional Spring Festival, saw its performance index drop by 19.8 points; while manufacturing, wholesale and retail, catering, real estate, and service industries all made marginal adjustments in their performance indexes. Small and medium-sized enterprises showed stable performance and most enterprises in central and western China continued to make improvements. However, industrial production and sales continued to slow down and the profit of enterprises nationwide was reduced in the first quarter this year, the NBS said. Experts predicted that the performance index of Chinese enterprises will rise gradually to around 125 points in the second quarter, with production and profit growing up simultaneously. |
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