China's value-added industrial output, an important economic indicator, went up 24.5 percent year on year in the first quarter this year as factory activities continued to pick up, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed Friday.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, industrial output went up 2.01 percent, while in March alone, it jumped 14.1 percent year on year, the NBS said.

Output by major industrial firms increased by 14 percent compared with the first quarter in 2019, resulting in an average year-on-year Q1 growth of 6.8 percent over the past two years.

The industrial output is used to measure the activity of designated large enterprises with an annual business turnover of at least 20 million yuan (about 3.06 million U.S. dollars).

In a breakdown by ownership, output by the private sector went up 16.8 percent year on year in March while that by state-controlled enterprises rose 10.9 percent.

Among the three major sectors namely, manufacturing, mining, and production and supply of utilities, the manufacturing sector's output showed the fastest growth, climbing 15.2 percent year on year in March.

Meanwhile, the output of high-tech manufacturing expanded by 14.1 percent last month from a year ago.

China's industrial capacity utilization rate in the January-March period went up 9.9 percentage points from a year ago to 77.2 percent, the highest Q1 level since 2013, according to the NBS.

Friday's data showed that the Chinese economy grew 18.3 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2021 as strong domestic and foreign demands powered recovery from a low base in early 2020 when COVID-19 stalled the world's second-largest economy.