This photo taken on March 17, 2026 shows robots at a workshop of Inovance Group in Jiangning district of Nanjing, eastern China's Jiangsu province. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's value-added industrial output expanded 6.1 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2026, official data showed on Thursday.

The pace was 1.1 percentage points faster than the fourth quarter of last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

On a monthly basis, industrial output grew 0.28 percent in March.

The industrial output is used to measure the activity of large enterprises each with an annual main business turnover of at least 20 million yuan (about 2.91 million U.S. dollars).

A breakdown of the data showed that the mining sector's value-added output increased by 6 percent year on year in the first quarter, while that of the manufacturing sector grew by 6.4 percent. The value-added output of the electricity, heat, gas, and water production and supply sectors rose by 4.3 percent.