At present, it is the period when the third-quarter financial reports of A-share listed companies in mainland China are being disclosed. However, in the financial reports disclosed by some listed companies, there have been a series of low-level errors including data and time inaccuracies.
As of October 21, over 150 listed companies have released their official third-quarter financial reports. According to the customary practice of A-shares, most listed companies will officially announce their financial reports in late October or the last few days of October. It is expected that the financial reports of over 5,000 listed companies in the entire market will be fully disclosed within the next 10 days.
However, the financial reports that have been disclosed have frequently displayed low-level errors. Apart from textual errors such as wrong years, days of the week, or website URLs, some companies’ announcements also have issues like contradictions in core financial indicators, errors in cash flow details, and incorrect consolidation of subsidiary balance sheets.
According to reports from media such as “Daily Economic News” on October 21, a company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, with a recommendation to purchase, made errors in its financial report. In the disclosure dated October 14, in the section introduction of equity changes on the 2nd page of the announcement on reduction practices, the end time for the reduction process was stated as “1016 October 14”. The year 1016 AD (during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong of the Song Dynasty) was mistakenly mentioned.
In the A-share stock issuance documents of “Meili Technology” in 2026, the heading date on the 8th page of the combined balance sheet of the financial reports for the past year along with its audit report was written as “December 31, 2026”. Since 2026 has not ended yet, where did the annual report data come from?
Some listed companies have contradictory data, showing losses in the third-quarter financial reports while having a positive profit rate. For instance, the financial report of “Terui Machinery” indicates a net loss of 20.4935 million yuan for the third quarter, with a basic earnings per share of -0.07 yuan; however, the main financial indicators table shows a third-quarter return on equity (ROE) of 1.40%, with a year-on-year increase of 0.72 percentage points.
The financial report of “Yake Technology” shows that its subsidiary assets total only about 490,000 yuan, with liabilities of 4.5153 million yuan, yet the net assets are as high as 44.2844 million yuan. There is an error in the balance sheet total, and based on the calculation formula (total assets = liabilities + net assets), the company’s total assets amount to 48.8 million yuan, with an overstatement of over 48.3 million yuan compared to the book value, a difference of over 100 times.
During the previous period of semi-annual financial report releases, errors were also common among the disclosed data of A-share listed companies.
For example, the Hunan-listed steel company “Hualing Iron and Steel” mistakenly labeled the unit on a subsidiary financial statement in the semi-annual financial report from “ten thousand yuan” as “yuan”, resulting in Hualing Xianggang’s actual total assets of 66.276 billion yuan being displayed as only 66.276 million yuan, and a net profit of 250 million yuan only being shown as 250 thousand yuan. This error was corrected only about 20 days after the report was disclosed.
Other errors in the semi-annual financial reports include the non-existent “June 31”, misspelling “Chief Financial Officer” as “Chief Temporary Financial Officer”, and writing “People’s Government” as “Renminbi Government”. The misspelling of “Renminbi Government” by Zijin Mining has persisted from 2020 to 2026.