Profits of China's 169 key enterprises under the supervision of the state-owned assets watchdog reached 463.79 billion yuan (57.19 billion US dollars) in the first nine months of this year, up 22.4 percent from the same period of last year, a senior official said Monday.

Li Rongrong, director of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), told a working conference that the sales of the 169 enterprises came to 4842.1 billion yuan during the January-September period, a year-on-year increase of 23.4 percent.

He predicted that the sales of these enterprises will hit 6.5 trillion yuan this year, representing a growth rate of 17 percent. Profits are expected to top 590 billion yuan, up 21 percent, or 1.5 times that of 2002.

The revenues from the 169 enterprises made up 60 percent of the total tax revenues handed over to the state coffer by all of the country's SOEs, the director revealed.

With the deeping reform of the state-owned assets supervision system, the number of China's SOEs has dropped to less than 30,000.

SASAC aims to build 80-100 large state-owned enterprises with strong competitiveness in the international market.

The total assets of the central SOEs approached 9.2 trillion yuan (1.14 trillion US dollars) by 2004, with net assets totaling 3.9 trillion yuan. Eight of the central SOEs entered Forbes magazine's world top 500 companies in 2004, two more than in 2003.

Source: Xinhua