SEOUL, June 30 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's state-run enterprises marked a 20.6 percent gain in earnings last year as the non-operating profits from land holdings increased, a report by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance showed Sunday.

According to the Ministry, the South Korea's 24 major state-run companies reported a combined 5.2 trillion won (5 billion U.S. dollars) in net profit last year, up 0.9 trillion won from the previous year..

The increase mostly came from non-operating profits reported by some of the state-run companies including Korea Railroad, which earned 700 billion won from price hikes of its land holdings, the report said.

The report showed that the companies' combined sales increased 12.4 percent to 77.7 trillion won, while operating profit gained 2.7 percent to 5.7 trillion won during the same period.

Power monopoly Korea Electric Power Corp. ranked first in terms of earnings with net profit of 1.5 trillion won, followed by The Korea Land Corp. and Korea Housing Guarantee with 969.2 billion won and 668.8 billion won in earnings, respectively, the report added.

Meanwhile the report showed that out of the 24 companies, three state-run companies posted losses. The Korea Coal Corp. was the worst in terms of earnings by losing 92.9 billion won last year, according to the ministry.

The combined assets of South Korean state-run companies reached267.5 trillion won last year, up 11.1 percent from a year earlier, while the total debts amounted to 138.3 trillion won, up 16.3 percent from a year ago, the report added.

The report said that the debt increase was mainly due to an increase in borrowing for expanding overseas business by some of the companies.