The profits of industrial enterprises from China's 24 provincial regions rose 91.5 percent year on year to 978.5 billion yuan (143.26 billion U.S. dollars) in the first four months of 2010, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Friday.

The figure was 11.1 percentage points lower than the growth rate of the first quarter of 2010, the NBS said in a statement.

In the four-month period, 37 of the 39 major industrial sectors saw year-on-year profit growth, with the profits of ferrous-metal smelting and processing industry up 140 times year-on-year and those of the power sector up 7.8 times, the statement said.

Tobacco industry profits dropped 15 percent while nuclear-fuel processing, petroleum refining and metallurgical smelting sectors' profits declined 6.8 percent.

The bureau said core business revenue for the enterprises hit 16.12 trillion yuan in the January-April period, up 40 percent from a year earlier. That growth rate was 0.4 percentage points lower than that of the first quarter.

The 24 regions comprise all of China's provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions except Inner Mongolia and Tibet autonomous regions, Hunan, Guangdong, Hainan and Yunnan provinces, and Chongqing.