China’s industrial profits last month grew at their fastest pace in more than two years, easing fears that the Iran war would upend the sector.

The new figures still pointed to signs of China’s economic divergence: While exports remained strong, domestic consumption was paltry. Experts, meanwhile, noted that China’s so-called mastery of modularity — where firms focus on building blocks designed to be modular from conception, as in the case of cells in a solar panel — was propelling the country’s global industrial dominance.

“China invented the largest and fastest production and construction machine in history,” Oxford University researchers wrote.