China's mobile phone shipments edge up 0.9% in October

Primary school students take photos of sailboats during an outdoor course in Qingdao, Shandong province, in March. [Photo by Wang Haibin/For China Daily]

China's mobile phone shipments grew 0.9 percent year-on-year to 38.53 million units in October, ending a four-month decline streak, according to a report released Monday.

Total shipments during the January-October period reached 343 million units, down 15.3 percent from the same period last year, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) said in its report.

Shipment of 4G phones hit 36.42 million, up by 1.6 percent year-on-year, accounting for 94.5 percent of the total shipments in October, according to CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Chinese phones accounted for 84.4 percent of the total shipments last month with a 1.9-percent increase year-on-year to some 32.5 million units.

Meanwhile, the number of new models launched in October decreased 25 percent year-on-year, according to the report.