Emissions Cut - Profits Down

     Be careful what you wish for.  I know industry can be dirty, I live where there once was industry and people had jobs.  We are all for clean energy, but if business can not make a profit because of more and more government demands.....why be in business? 

From January to August, profits of Chinese industrial enterprises rose 55 percent year on year, down from the increase of 81.6 percent in the first five months, the previous period over which the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) conducted the survey, the NBS announced on Monday.

The NBS figures showed that from January to August, profits of industrial enterprises -- those with annual sales exceeding 5 million yuan ($746,194) each -- totaled 2.6 trillion yuan.

During the period, revenues of industrial firms totalled 43.1 trillion yuan, up 33.4 percent from a year earlier, but the growth rate declined by 4.8 percentage points from the January-May period.

The growth in profits saw an even sharper fall from the first two months, the first nationwide survey period of 2010, when industrial profits climbed by 119 percent from January-February last year.

Heavy industries saw the biggest slowdown in profits.

In the ferrous metals smelting and processing sector, the profits growth rate fell to 99.7 percent in the year to August, down from 3,290 percent for the first five months, according to the NBS.

For smelters and processors of non-ferrous metals, the profits rose by 130 percent, much slower than the 330 percent for the January-May period.

Firms in the sector of generating and providing electricity and heating power made 120 percent more profits than the same period last year, but the growth rate was down from the previous 260 percent.

Experts said the slowdown was a sign that a series of government moves to improve the country's energy efficiency, measured by consumption of energy relative to economic output, were taking effect.

Zhuang Jian, senior economist at the Asian Development Bank, told Xinhua that high energy-intensive firms were concentrated in the heavy industries, which accounted for a very high proportion of industrial profits.