The loss made by 872 funds managed by 64 fund companies, however, was 50.8 percent less than their combined loss in the third quarter of the year, the newspaper said without elaborating.

China's main stock index, the Shanghai Composite Index <.SSEC>, dropped 6.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 after slumping 14.6 percent in the third quarter, driven by investor worries over a slowdown of the world's second-largest economy amid global weakness.

(Reporting by Lu Jianxin and Melanie Burton; Editing by Ken Wills)