In the January-April period this year, the ferrous metal smelting and rolling sector in China recorded a gross profit of RMB 7.58 billion ($1.1 billion), down 51.5 percent year on year, as announced by China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on May 27.
The automotive sector recorded a gross profit of RMB 111.87 billion ($16.4 billion) in the first four months, down 16.8 percent year on year.
At the same time, the ferrous metals mining and dressing sector, the metal manufacturing sector and the railway, shipping, aerospace and other transportation equipment manufacturing sector recorded gross profits of RMB 15.31 billion ($2.2 billion), RMB 36.97 billion ($5.4 billion) and RMB 41.8 billion ($6.1 billion) in the January-April period this year, up 22.1 percent, down 13.8 percent and up 7.5 percent year on year, respectively.
In the first three months this year, the ferrous metal smelting and rolling sector in China recorded a gross loss of RMB 3.34 billion ($0.49 billion), while which recorded a gross profit of RMB 7.58 billion in the first four months, signaling the improvement in the operating performance of steel industry. However, the ferrous metal smelting and rolling sector in China indicated a year-on-year decline of 51.5 percent in the first four months.
This marks the definitive end of the steel industry's era of windfall profits. In addition, it is not a cyclical fluctuation, but a structural inflection point—the retreat of real estate, the fading of export dividends, and the increasing green costs--those three forces converging to usher the industry into a prolonged "new normal" of meager profits or even losses.
In the given period, the aggregate gross profit of large and medium-sized industrial enterprises in China amounted to RMB 2.43584 trillion ($0.36 trillion), up 18.2 percent year on year.
