According to the financial data of industrial enterprises released by the National Bureau of Statistics recently, from January to April, the profits of industrial enterprises above designated size increased by 6.5% year-on-year, and the growth rate dropped by 0.9 percentage points from the first quarter. Among them, profits in April increased by 4.2%, and the growth rate was 6.9 percentage points lower than that in March.

Liang Jing, a researcher at the Bank of China's Institute of International Finance, said the decline in industrial profit growth was mainly due to the slowdown in economic demand and non-main activity income. In April, the growth rates of investment, consumption, and exports all declined, making it difficult to form a strong support for industrial production and sales. The company's main business income increased by 2% year-on-year, down 2.6 percentage points from March. At the same time, the driving effect of income from non-main business activities on profits could not be sustained. The investment income of enterprises changed from an increase of 20.4% in March to a decrease of 19.8% in April; non-operating net income increased by 56.2% year-on-year, down 12.1 percentage points from the previous month. Investment income and non-operating net income contributed to the new industrial profits. decline.

He Ping, director of the Industrial Benefit Division of the Industrial Department of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that investment income has changed from rising to falling, and its effect on profit growth has also changed from a positive pull to a negative pull, reducing the profit growth rate of all industrial enterprises above designated size by 2.7 percentage points.

In addition, Guo Lei, chief macro analyst at Founder Securities, pointed out that the decline in profit growth of industrial enterprises in April had a base effect. In April 2016, the working day was 20 days, and from 2012 to 2015, it was 21 days; in March this year, the working day was one more day than the same period last year. This would lead to an overestimation of March data and an underestimation of April data.

Many experts believe that, on the whole, the data on the benefits of industrial enterprises announced this time still show some positive changes. He Ping believes that positive changes are mainly manifested in four aspects. First, the profits of industrial enterprises in April continued the growth trend since the beginning of the year. Since the beginning of this year, the profits of industrial enterprises have maintained growth in each month, changing the situation of declining profits in 2015. Second, the profits of high-tech manufacturing industries grew rapidly. From January to April, the profit of high-tech manufacturing industry increased by 21.6% year-on-year, 15.1 percentage points higher than that of all industrial enterprises above designated size. Third, the decline in profits of major raw material industries such as steel and non-ferrous metals has been reversed. Fourth, the inventories of finished products experienced negative growth. At the end of April, the inventory of finished products of industrial enterprises fell by 1.2% year-on-year, the first negative growth in recent years, indicating that the pressure on enterprises' inventory is easing, which is conducive to the release of enterprise production capacity and the increase of production in the future.

Guo Lei said that the industries with relatively high recent prosperity, one is black and non-ferrous smelting, the growth rate has changed from negative to positive, obviously benefiting from the narrowing of deflation, the high operating rate of the midstream and the changes in price expectations; the second is agricultural sideline Food processing and food manufacturing both bucked the trend and accelerated slightly compared with the previous month, obviously benefiting from the formation of the reflation cycle; the third is the electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing industry, with a growth rate of 1.4 percentage points, which should be in line with the growth rate of new projects in fixed asset investment. related to high growth.

Regarding the future trend of improving the efficiency of industrial enterprises, Liang Jing believes that it is still difficult to be optimistic, and it depends on policy support in the short term. At present, the downward pressure on the economy is still relatively large, the problem of overcapacity is still prominent, and it is difficult for the profits of industrial enterprises to improve significantly. In particular, state-owned enterprises are mostly concentrated in some heavy industries and areas with excess capacity. From January to April, profits fell by 7.8% year-on-year, an increase of 2.1 percentage points from the previous month. At the same time, there are still uncertainties in the real estate market and the recovery of commodity prices, and the profitability of industries that contributed more to the new industrial profits in the early stage is not very sustainable. However, the implementation of policies such as cost reduction and stable growth in the short term is conducive to maintaining stable operating efficiency of enterprises.