BEIJING - Home appliance sales in rural China continued to boom under a subsidy program, data from the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) showed Friday.

The MOC figure showed that as of October 2011 the government had handed out 51.8 billion yuan ($8.18 billion) in subsidies, resulting in total sales of over 200 million units of home appliances valued at 457.6 billion yuan.

In the first ten months of this year, 85.2 million subsidized home appliance units were sold to rural consumers, up 43.5 percent year on year, with sales hitting 215.8 billion yuan, the MOC said in a statement on its website.

In October alone, a total of 10.44 million units of home appliances under the subsidy program were purchased and the sales reached 27.6 billion yuan, up 53.6 percent and 71.1 percent from the same period last year, respectively, the MOC said.