China's major industrial firms saw their profit rebound strongly in August, surging 17.2 percent from one year earlier, official data showed Wednesday.

This was compared with a decline of 6.7 percent in July and June's fall of 8.3 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

In the first eight months of the year, the profits of major industrial firms with annual main business revenue of at least 20 million yuan (about 2.79 million U.S. dollars) reached 4.66 trillion yuan, down 11.7 percent year on year, with the pace of decline narrowing by 3.8 percentage points from the first seven months.