QINGDAO - China's industrial robot market continued to shrink in 2019 but remained the world's largest for the seventh straight year, the China Robot Industry Alliance (CRIA) announced on Monday.

Sales of industrial robots in China fell by 8.6 percent year-on-year to 144,000 units last year. The decline was 7.7 percentage points deeper than in 2018, according to statistics from CRIA and the International Federation of Robotics released at the 2020 China Robot Industry Development Conference held in Qingdao, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province.

Sales of foreign brands were about 99,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 12.2 percent, while sales of domestic brands hit about 45,000 units, a slight increase of 0.8 percent.

The CRIA predicted that China's industrial robot market is likely to post growth in 2020.