BEIJING, Feb. 24 -- China's centrally-administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the supervision of the state assets watchdog saw profits grow 200 percent year on year in January, the watchdog said Tuesday.

The SOEs reaped 74.33 billion yuan (10.88 billion U.S. dollars) in profit in January 2001. The figure, however, was down 14.5 percent from December 2009, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) said in a statement on its website.

Revenues for the central SOEs increased 67.8 percent year on year to 1.16 trillion yuan, down 23.1 percent from December 2009, the SASAC said.

Zhang Xinfa, an economist with the Galaxy Securities, attributed the sharp year-on-year rises to extraordinarily low comparison bases a year ago due to the global economic downturn.

In January 2010, the SOEs paid a total of 136.64 billion yuan in tax, up 51.7 percent from a year earlier, or 61.6 percent higher than in December last year.

Despite the global downturn, China's central SOEs posted a 14.6 percent rise in profits in 2009 compared with 2008, the SASAC said in January.

China currently has 128 central SOEs after the China National Packaging Corporation (CNPC) was approved to be merged into China Chengtong Group in February this year.