Agricultural Bank of China Ltd <1288.HK><601288.SS>, the country's third-largest bank by market value, said on Wednesday that third-quarter net profit rose 40.25 percent, beating expectations.

Agbank recorded a 34.09 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) net profit for the July-September period, up from 24.31 billion yuan a year earlier, the bank said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

The result beat an average estimate of 33.88 billion yuan from 10 analysts surveyed by Reuters.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones and Kelvin Soh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Chris Lewis)