One-fifth of China's 213 million netizens are mobile users
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Several news stories have noted that China's internet user base increased by more than 70 million in 2007 to a count 213 million at year's end. Little noted is that 23 percent of these users use the internet from mobile devices.
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The number of mobile phone users will overtake the number of nonusers this year for the first time, according to the U.N. telecoms agency.
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Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)  Beijing, 8 December: More than 13.2 per cent of netizens under the age of 18 suffer from internet addiction, said a report issued by the China National Children's Centre here Friday [8 December].
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China Mobile Communications, currently the largest operator of mobile communication services in China, will establish a 3G (third-generation) experimental network in Beijing at the beginning of next year, according to the China-based Xinhua Online.
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(InfoWorld) - In mature economies, the mobile phone started out as a luxury item, a convenient way to talk to friends and family from anywhere. But in emerging markets, first-time users are turning to mobile phones for more than convenient chatter. They're using their phones as the only way to access the Internet, to use banks for the first time, and to start small businesses. Opera Software, Vodafone Group, Google, and Nokia are among the companies that have recently offered evidence of the use of the mobile Web and other non-voice applications in emerging markets. In general, the use of mobile phones in developing economies is booming. The number of mobile subscribers in developing countries grew five-fold from 2000 to 2005, reaching 1.4 billion and accounting for 70 percent of the total global market, according to a recent report from Vodafone, The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and World Resource Institute. Those subscribers are doing more than talking. "Mobile is becoming a significant way to access the Web and a growing number of people will get their first experience of the Net on a mobile device," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and chief executive at Nokia, during a recent investors conference. He says it makes sense that people in some emerging markets would use their phones instead of PCs to access the Internet. In India, for example, 136 million people have mobile phones and fewer than 20 million have PCs, Kallasvuo said. Nokia has evidence of the predominance of mobile Web users outside of developed regions. Its mobile-enabled Web site gets around 90 million hits every month and 60 million of those come from users in China, Kallasvuo said. Google has also recognized the trend. "Mobile devices in India and China are the primary devices for users to experience the Internet," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development for Google, speaking during a recent conference. With 1 billion Internet users and 2 billion mobile users around the world, it makes sense for Google to tweak its offerings for mobile users, he said. Browser developer Opera says that downloads of its Opera Mini client also demonstrate the widespread use of mobile phones to access the Web in developing economies. While Opera has primarily marketed Opera Mini in developed markets, India, South Africa, China, and Russia are among the top 10 regions for Opera Mini downloads, said Tor Odland, an Opera spokesman. Worldwide, 8 million people have installed Opera Mini, a small browser that users download onto their phones. The software communicates with Opera servers, which strip down Web sites so that they'll load quickly and fit nicely onto the small screens of mobile phones. Opera Mini is popular in Bangladesh and has lead to increased usage of Grameenphone Ltd.'s EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) network, said Shakil Ahmed, an engineer at Grameenphone. More than 1 million people subscribe to Grameenphone's EDGE offering with 250,000 of them regular users of the mobile Internet, he said. Grameenphone customers like Opera Mini because it lets them access the Web without owning a PC, he said. Because Opera hosts the servers that the phone software connects with to access the Internet, it can track where traffic is coming from. Recently, traffic in Africa has been growing, Odland said. Those African customers could be using Internet connections on their phones to do banking. Vodafone's recent report concluded that while using banks makes poor people less vulnerable in times of crisis, low-income people in Africa often don't bank because branches may be far from their homes and because transactions at cash machines and branches often incur fees. South Africa is an example of a place that could be ideal for mobile banking. Among people in South Africa who don't use banks, 19 percent have a cell phone and an additional 11 percent have access to a friend or family member's cell phone, the study found. The research also found that 94 percent of low-income people in South Africa who already do mobile banking say it's valuable because it's more affordable than traditional banking. Opera reports that despite not marketing Opera Mini in South Africa, 200,000 people in the country have downloaded the client. In 2005, just under 10 percent of the population of South Africa had Internet access, according to Research4Business, a research firm. Anecdotally, Opera is also seeing increased usage of Opera Mini in Nigeria. The company has been receiving e-mails from Nigerian users with questions on using the browser and other comments. One enterprising Nigerian, who e-mailed Opera with his story, found that people were asking him for help downloading and starting to use Opera Mini, said Rolf Assev, chief commercial officer for Opera. The Nigerian entrepreneur put an advertisement in the newspaper and now charges a fee for instruction on how to use the Internet via Opera Mini on cell phones. "He said, 'this is beautiful. People don't have computers but a lot of people have phones,'" Assev said.
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(InfoWorld) - One of Jack Ma's companies has 27 million registered users, but the Alibaba.com chief executive officer can only think of the people not using his site. "We want to show how big the China market is," Ma said Saturday in an interview in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered. The group's auction site, Taobao.com, claims 27 million registered users and about 70 percent of China's consumer auction market. "I want the Taobao team to focus on getting more and more people and more and more transactions," Ma said, adding that "110 million [Chinese Internet] users are not using the site." To encourage use, Ma announced in 2005 that Taobao would not charge for transactions or listings. "Last year we said three years. Maybe next year we'll think about starting to charge," he said. He also projected that the auction company will account for 30 percent of Alibaba's revenue by 2010. Ma, whose Chinese name is Ma Yun, said he still has no timetable for the company to go public. "It is a golden time for Alibaba to get ready for the next wave of e-commerce in China." He sees that next wave as the large-scale adoption of e-commerce by small and medium-sized businesses. SMBs will be "the engine for the next five to 10 years of the Chinese economy," he said. E-commerce is the Internet's "third wave" in China, Ma said, having been preceded by revenue generated from short messaging service (SMS), which provided a way for Web portals to collect subscription fees, and then from online and mobile gaming. There is no rush for Alibaba to go public, Ma said. "We spent $750 million to buy out all the small investors and let our long-time employees cash out. This is why it's not urgent for us to go public," he said, referring to money gained from a $1 billionÂ investment in AlibabaÂ last year by Yahoo, which took a 40 percent stake in the company and handed over control of its China unit as part of the deal. Of Yahoo China's first year under Alibaba management, he said, "We're happy with the first year results. Yahoo survived." Headcount doubled from 400 to 800, he said. "I want to lower expectations for Yahoo China," Ma said, adding that he wanted to do something "new and fresh" with it. The site's new search technology would be ready at the end of September or early October, with which Ma said, "We can compete" with Baidu and Google's sites. "Next year, we want to make Yahoo China healthy. Then the next year, we make it a top-tier company, top three [in China]," he said. Yahoo shareholders are getting a good return on their investment, according to Ma. "Even if Alipay [Alibaba's online payment company] is zero, Taobao is zero, and Yahoo is losing money, Alibaba.com is already profitable." The group has over $250 million in the bank, and is cash-flow positive, Ma said. Speaking earlier in the day at the company's Alifest company event in Hangshou, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang said "We are extremely satisfied with our cooperation with Ma Yun." He added that when Yahoo was re-examining its presence in China, "we looked for the most suitable partner, and we invested in Alibaba."
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Latest statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry show that China exported more than four million Chinese-brand mobile phones from January to September, far exceeding last year&#39;s total of 2.06 million.
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Mobile phone subscribers around the globe totaled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
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The number of Internet users in China is up 53 percent from 2006--and it is poised to become the world's top Internet market.
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InfoWorld - The number of Chinese Internet users hit 162 million at the end of June, growing at the fastest rate since 2004, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said Wednesday.
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Any day now China will have more web users than the US, but the net has been tamed by Beijing's iron grip
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Apple's iPhone is used by 50% more people to browse the Internet than all the phones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, according to data from Net Applications.
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Almost 40 percent of Chinese own mobile phones, and the number of subscribers is likely to hit 500 million before the end of June.
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Singapore Telecommunications , southeast Asia&#39;s largest phone company, said on Monday its mobile phone user base rose 7.7 per cent in September to 56 million, reflecting robust growth in regional markets.
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SHANGHAI, China  -- China's second-largest mobile phone company plans to open 3,000 Internet cafes by the end of the year, exerting stronger state control over a sector once dominated by private enterprise, state-run radio reported Tuesday.    China Unicom already operates 400 Internet cafes in China and plans to start up as many as 200 more by year's end, China Radio International reported...
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While young people embrace the Web with  real or virtual friends and their cell phone is never far away,  relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in  Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.
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China is leading the world in the number of subscribers to broadband through phone lines, says a report.