BEIJING - China's mobile phone shipments dropped 29.2 percent year-on-year to about 69.35 million units in the first quarter of this year, according to a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

Shipments of 5G mobile phones amounted to 53.88 million units during the period, a drop of 22.9 percent, said the CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

5G phones continued to dominate China's smartphone market in the first three months, accounting for 77.7 percent of all phone shipments.

In March alone, China shipped a total of 21.46 million phones, down 40.5 percent from the same period of last year, the report said.

Data showed that China shipped 266 million 5G phones in 2021, surging by 63.5 percent from 2020.