Lucy Lu
The Chinese mobile Internet market shows substantial growth with a recent survey from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showing 4G mobile users have surpassed 302 million.
According to the report, the number of Chinese 4G users experienced an increase of 25.15 million through to September, pushing Chinese 4G subscribers to exceed 300 million.
China Mobile claims the most 4G subscribers with a 157.5 million user increase for the first three quarters and total users of 247.6 million. Thus, China Mobile accounts for about 82% of the 4G mobile market, the other 18% is shared between China Unicom and China Telecom.
On the contrary, 3G subscribers decreased by 8.8 million through to September. This indicates high speed users are converting to the 4G network.
So far, the total number of mobile users nationwide amounts to 1.29 billion. This means almost 95% of Chinese are using mobile phones. This explains why growth of mobile users only increased by 13.72 million over the past 9 months.
Nine provinces have reached 100% saturation, namely Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Fujian, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Hainan and Ningxia.
Mobile Internet users, both 3G and 4G, total 730 million.
