A worker assembles a robotic arm at a factory in Foshan, Guangdong province. [Provided to China Daily]

BEIJING - 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 National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.

Those companies reported an 8.5 percent profit increase in 2016, reversing a 2.3 percent 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 percent year on year, slowing down by 12.2 percentage points from the November figure.