China's smartphone shipments fell 4.5 percent year on year in October to 34.6 million units, according to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

Last month, smartphones made up 96.2 percent of all mobile phone shipments in the country, said a report from the CAICT, a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Overall mobile phone shipments declined 6.7 percent year on year to 35.96 million units, dipping 0.7 percent month on month.

In the first 10 months of this year, China's cellphone shipments slipped 5.8 percent from a year earlier to 323 million units, according to the report.