China's cultural sector continues to pick up in Q1

BEIJING - Major enterprises in China's cultural sector and related businesses saw a stable increase in revenue and profits in the first quarter of this year, official data showed Monday.

The surveyed 76,000 enterprises raked in 3.11 trillion yuan ($437.62 billion) in combined revenue last year, up 8.5 percent year-on-year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

With the effective implementation of policies to advance the development of modern culture system, the supply of cultural products has been enriched and the potential of cultural consumption has been continuously unleashed, said Zhang Peng, an NBS senior statistician.

Profits of these firms rose 5.8 percent year-on-year to nearly 211.6 billion yuan, said Zhang.

Companies featuring new business forms, such as providers of animation, internet games services, wearable smart cultural devices and entertainment-purposed smart drones, pocketed almost 1.26 trillion yuan in revenue in the first quarter, an 11.9 percent uplift.