Japan's government statistics showed on Friday that the country's corporate profits in the fourth quarter of 2018 decreased for the first time in two and a half years, local media reported.

Pretax profits declined to 19.48 trillion yen (175 billion U.S. dollars), down 7 percent in the fourth quarter last year, the first decline since the second quarter of 2016, according to government data.

The poorest performers included oil refiners, vehicle producers and telecommunications equipment makers amid rising costs of labor and raw material.

Solid sales increased by 3.7 percent to reach 371.62 trillion yen (3.34 trillion U.S. dollars), which contributed to profits earning but was not enough to offset increasing costs and sluggish exports.

According to the finance ministry, in order to boost productivity, corporations made efforts to step up capital expenditure in 2018.

Compared with the previous quarter, capital expenditure increased by 3.3 percent, which included expenditure of software.

Spending on items like building factories and adding equipment in corporations of all non-financial sectors amounted to 12.05 trillion yen (108 billion U.S. dollars), up 5.7 percent.

On average, each of the 31,826 companies capitalized at 10 million yen (89,389 U.S. dollars) or more, of which 72.3 percent, or 23,025 corporations, responded to the finance ministry's survey.