For the first nine months of the year, China's biggest listed steel producer, known as Baosteel, made 7.86 billion yuan ($1.17 billion) in net profit, down 12.9% from the same period last year, it said in a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Thursday.

That put third-quarter profit at 3.86 billion yuan, against 2.47 billion yuan in the second quarter.

"In the third quarter ... demand from downstream sectors like vehicles, home appliances and engineering machinery continued to recover," the company said, adding that it had cut 4.9 billion yuan of costs over the first three quarters and overcome the impact from blast furnace maintenance.

The results were Baosteel's best quarterly performance since the final quarter of 2018.

In the first nine months of the year, Baosteel churned out 32.8 million tonnes of iron and 35.3 million tonnes of steel, according to the filing.

Nine-month revenue was at 200 billion yuan, down 7.8% from Jan-Sept 2019. It aims to achieve total income of 270.4 billion yuan this year.

($1 = 6.7029 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Min Zhang and Shivani Singh; Editing by David Goodman)

By Min Zhang and Shivani Singh