BEIJING - Huawei's Hisilicon chip unit overtook US semiconductor giant Qualcomm to be the biggest mobile phone chip supplier in China for the first time, latest report showed Wednesday.

In the first quarter, the market share of Kirin, a mobile phone chip developed by Huawei's chipset subsidiary HiSilicon, stood at 43.9 percent on the Chinese mainland, according to a semiconductor report from research and consulting company CINNO.

Qualcomm ranked second with a market share of 32.8 percent, dropping from 48.1 percent in the same period last year, while Media Tek and Apple followed with 13.1 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively.

As the COVID-19 epidemic took a massive toll on China's mobile phone sales, the country's phone processor shipments plunged 44.5 percent year-on-year in the first three months, the report said.

However, Huawei further expanded its smartphone market rate to 36.9 percent this quarter from 28.7 percent in the same period of 2019, with other Android phone brands seeing their numbers dwindling, according to the data analysis firm Aurora Mobile.

China's mobile phone shipments fell 36.4 percent year-on-year to 48.95 million units during the first three months, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.