BEIJING -- China's mobile phone shipments stood at 249 million units in the first nine months of the year, up 10.2 percent year-on-year, according to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

In September, the country's mobile phone shipments dropped 8.1 percent year-on-year to reach 21.44 million units, said the CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

A total of 58 new models were released last month, down 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the data showed.

The country's domestic brands continued to dominate mobile phone shipments last month. Their shipments reached around 20.27 million units, making up 94.5 percent of the total shipments.

In the January-September period, shipments by domestic brands went up 8.9 percent year-on-year to reach 224 million units, according to the CAICT.