China's major industrial firms ended their days of profit losses and reaped good returns in 2016 on the back of a construction boom, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday. 
Those companies reported an 8.5 percent profit increase in 2016, reversing a 2.3 % decline registered in 2015, the NBS said in a statement. 
NBS statistician He Ping said industrial firms showed remarkable improvement in performance, featuring a rise of 5.97 percent in their profitability. 
In December, their profits grew 2.3 % year on year, slowing down by 12.2 % from the November figure.