China's mobile phone shipments dropped 17.7 percent year on year to top 33.02 million units in January, according to a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

A total of 30 new models were released last month, down 43.4 percent from a year earlier, said the CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Chinese brands continued to dominate the domestic mobile phone market. Their shipments topped 25.65 million units, making up 77.7 percent of the total shipments.

In January, Chinese brands rolled out 26 phone models, down 48 percent year on year, the data showed.

Last year, China's mobile phone shipments climbed 13.9 percent from 2020 to 351 million units.