China reports 15.5% profit growth at covered industrial firms; AI demand lifts select sectors

China’s National Bureau of Statistics said profits at industrial firms above the designated-size threshold rose 15.5% year on year in the first nine months of 2026, reaching 6.03374 trillion yuan. The nationwide result covers industrial companies above a government-defined revenue threshold. It is broader than the sectors the bureau associated with artificial-intelligence demand.

In a companion analysis of the data, the bureau linked AI computing and advanced-storage demand to profit gains in selected electronics businesses. The analysis did not say AI caused the overall 15.5% increase.

Electronics-industry profit doubled from a year earlier and contributed 9.6 percentage points to growth in profit across all industrial firms covered by the survey, according to the analysis. Within the industry, profit in electronic-specialty-material manufacturing increased 220%, while semiconductor discrete-device manufacturing profit increased 51.7%.

The bureau also tied computing-power and data-center construction to a 570% increase in optical-fiber manufacturing profit and a 110% increase in optical-cable manufacturing profit. Profit at high-tech manufacturers covered by the survey rose 52.0%, and that group accounted for 25.5% of the total, up 6.2 percentage points from a year earlier. For related industry context, see Nokia’s third-quarter network results.

Demand for copper, aluminum and other base metals from AI and new-energy fields helped raise nonferrous-metal sector profit by 79.7%, the bureau said. That attribution combines the two sources of demand and does not isolate AI’s contribution.

Growth was uneven. Manufacturing profit rose 17.0%, while profit in electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply fell 14.3%; automobile-manufacturing profit declined 22.8%. The survey covers industrial legal entities with annual main-business revenue of at least 20 million yuan. The bureau said the growth rates are calculated on a comparable basis to account for changes in the survey population and the removal of duplicate data.