Over 117 Million Mobile Internet Users in China

CNNIC recently released two reports on China’s mobile Internet, according to the reports, there are already over 640 million mobile users in China by the end of 2008, among them about 117.6 million users have used mobile devices to access Internet in last six months, more than doubled from a year ago. The report said that about 34% of China’s mobile Internet users are active mobile Internet users everyday.

Some key findings of the report are:

• 74.6% of China’s mobile Internet users are male;
• China’s mobile Internet users are very young, even compared with China’s Internet users. 70.8% of mobile Internet users are under 19 years old, vs. 35.6% of Internet users;
• Similar to Internet usage, mobile instant messenger is the most popular mobile Internet applications, with about 31.2% penetration rate;
• About 6.6 million users are using mobile music services, but I’m not sure about the definition of mobile music in the report;
• About 39.6% of users, I suppose it is mobile Internet users instead of all mobile users, are reading Mobile Newspapers, which is a service by China’s mobile carriers;
• The report on mobile media also said about 15.7% users are using mobile video service, which is unexpectedly high since there was no 3G network available. I think it is partly because CNNIC only did the survey in four big cities, i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. But we should note that in the report, mobile video service refers to playing video in your mobile phone, no matter it is streaming directly from mobile Internet or it is transferred to your mobile from computers;
• Mobile novel service is quite popular in China with 27.7% usage rate.