China's industrial profit declines

The combined profit of China's major industrial companies fell 6.2% to 381.2 billion yuan ($60.45 billion) in August from a year earlier, according to data issued by the National Bureau of Statistics on Thursday. That's steeper than July's 5.4% slide. For the eight months through August, profit fell by 3.1% from a year earlier to 3.060 trillion Yuan, picking up the pace from a 2.7% decline in the first seven months of the year. The data cover industrial companies with annual income on major businesses of at least 20 million Yuan. The current standard was adopted from 2011 and is higher than the original threshold of 5 million yuan, the statistics bureau said in a statement.