Profits at China’s industrial firms grew at a much slower pace in November, the country’s statistics bureau said on Dec. 27, as still-high raw material prices, a faltering property market, and weaker consumer demand weighed on factories’ margins. Industrial firms’ profit growth decelerated to 9 percent year-on-year in November to 806 billion yuan ($127 billion)—the slowest since mid-2020—following a 24.6 percent gain reported in October. Since the beginning of this year, profits have climbed 38 percent on-year to 7.98 trillion yuan by the end of November, slower than the 42.2 percent rise in the first 10 months of 2021, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). “Companies still face great cost pressures, and the improvement in profits for downstream sector needs to be further consolidated,” Zhu Hong, a senior statistician at NBS, said in a statement accompanying the data release. Although fuel providers saw their profits rise in the …