MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Oil and chemistry bring big revenues to China

Chinese profits from petroleum and chemicals rose 45.2 percent in the first nine months of 2018, compared to the same period last year.

The oil and chemical industries have meant a 712.1 billion yuan (around 103 billion US dollar) profit for the first three quarters of the year for China's treasure, which equals a 45.2 percent increase from the same period of 2017, according to official Ministry of Industry and Information Technology figures released Monday.

China's newsagency Xinhua reported that the figure took up 14.3 percent of the total profits generated by domestic industrial companies, each having an annual income of more than 20 million yuan.

With a total asset of 12.75 trillion yuan, up 6.1 percent over the first nine months of 2017, the sector's asset-liability ratio fell by 1.16 percentage points to 54.19 percent, while the profit rate climbed up by 1.56 percentage points to 7.43 percent, Xinhua added.

The overall prices of oil and natural gas surged by 24.6 percent during the January-September period, while those for chemical raw materials and chemical products went up by 7.2 percent.

The industry's total exports during the same period rose by 22.8 percent to 521.66 billion yuan. The growth rate was 8.6 percentage points higher than the same period of last year.

Fixed assets investment in chemical raw materials and chemical manufacturing rose by 1.7 percent, the first increase since the end of January but lower than the 5.4-percent national average growth for industrial investment, according to the figures of the National Bureau of Statistics, the Xinhua report concluded.