China's CIMC Q1 net up 3.24 pct on share sales

SHANGHAI, April 28 (Reuters) - China's CIMC, the world's largest shipping container maker, said on Tuesday its first-quarter net profit edged up 3.24 percent from a year earlier thanks to a jump in investment income from share sales.

China International Marine Containers (Group) Co (CIMC) (200039.SZ) (000039.SZ), which last month announced a fourth-quarter loss of 295 million yuan ($43 million) as the global financial crisis weighed on its results, said its core business of dry-cargo container manufacturing remained very weak in the first quarter.

CIMC reported a net attributable to the listed company's investors of 418.97 million yuan in the first quarter of this year, compared with 405.81 million yuan in the same period of last year.

The earnings were driven by its investment income, which jumped more than 10-fold to 653.94 million yuan from 55.27 million yuan a year earlier as the company sold its share holdings in China Merchants Bank (600036.SS), its quarterly earnings report showed.

"In the reporting period, demand in the dry-cargo container market did not improve, with our company's production of dry-cargo containers remaining largely suspended," it said in the report published in the official Shanghai Securities News.

Consequently, its turnover plunged 64.5 percent year on year to 4.26 billion yuan in the first quarter, it said.

The company had earlier said it was forced to stop producing dry-cargo containers in the fourth quarter of last year due to waning demand as the global economy slowed. ($1=6.83 Yuan) (Reporting by Lu Jianxin and Edmund Klamann; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner)