BEIJING — China’s value-added industrial output, an important economic indicator, grew 5.9 percent year on year in December, down from 6.2-percent growth recorded in November, official data showed on Jan 19.

Year-on-year growth for 2015 was 6.1 percent, lower than the 8.3-percent growth in 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

Industrial output, officially called value-added industrial output, is used to measure the activity of designated large enterprises with an annual turnover of at least 20 million yuan ($3.05 million).

The figure was released by the NBS with other major economic indicators for December and the whole of 2015.

Breaking it down, manufacturing output expanded 7 percent in 2015, 2.4 percentage points lower than the previous year. Mining output growth decelerated to 2.7 percent from 4.5 percent in 2014.

Last year, the output for electricity, heating, gas and water grew 1.4 percent, down from the 3.2-percent growth in 2014.

Industrial output of state-owned and state-controlled enterprises saw 1.4-percent growth year on year in 2015, while that of joint stock companies expanded by 7.3 percent. Meanwhile, industrial output of enterprises funded by overseas investors grew by 3.7 percent.

In 2015, the industrial output in the high-tech sector surged 10.2 percent year on year, significantly higher than the average growth for the secondary industry.

In the first 11 months of 2015, total profits of designated large enterprises reached 5.54 trillion yuan, down 1.9 percent year on year, according to the NBS.