Suicide has been cited as a possible cause in the death of Wu Shengfu, chairman of China First Heavy Industries, China's biggest heavy equipment maker, whose body was found around midnight on Sunday.

China Business News cited insiders as saying Wu committed suicide in his office in Qigihar city, Heilongjiang province, northeast China.

China's top discipline inspection agency began investigating the heavy machine maker a month ago after the country's anti-corruption campaign had swept several sectors and fields. From July 6 until Sept 5 the company is under inspection by the Central Commission for Discipline of the Communist Party of China.

Wu died a month after the start of the investigation, but there is no official result of the check, and China Daily couldn't confirm any related information.

Vice chairman Zhao Lixin is acting chairman and the company is running normally the company said. No reason for Wu's death were given.

The company announced Wu's death in a brief statement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Monday without providing details. Shares in the company surged by the 10 percent trading limit on Tuesday, after tumbling on Monday.

Wu was born in 1964 in Jiangsu province and died at the age of 54. He had been working at the company for 27 years.

From 1981 to 1988 he studied mechanic manufacturing at Yanshan University for undergraduate and graduate studies.

He started at First Heavy in 1988 and successively held several positions including researcher, deputy chief engineer, vice general manager and member of the standing committee of the company's Communist Party branch. Since 2004 he had served as general manager.

In the first quarter, the firm suffered a loss of 290 million yuan ($46.77 million). Last year, the company achieved sales revenues of 733 million yuan, down 12.44 percent over the previous year.

During his career Wu was awarded self-innovation prizes multiple times, and was chief designer of the world's largest free forging hydraulic press. In 2008 he was selected as No1 among China's top 10 innovative management entrepreneurs.

He proposed building the company into an international technical equipment provider with an annual output of 50 billion yuan.