China’s industrial sector just had a bad November, and the numbers make it hard to pretend otherwise. Industrial profits fell 13.1% year-on-year last month, the largest single-month decline in 14 months, according to data released December 27 by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
To put that in sequence: October was already rough, with a 5.5% drop. November made October look like a warm-up.
The cumulative picture is even more telling. Profits across industrial firms for the first eleven months of 2025 grew just 0.1% year-on-year. That’s down sharply from the 1.9% gain recorded through October, meaning November’s damage was severe enough to nearly wipe out everything the sector had built up over the prior ten months.
What’s dragging profits down
Two forces are doing most of the damage here: weak domestic demand and factory-gate deflation.
