Let’s take a look at the highlights from the infographic (the full thing is embedded at bottom) and the newest statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Line.

Facebook in Thailand

Zoning in on Facebook, the ZocialInc crew finds that the peak time for posting is 11pm. These are the demographics within Thailand:

Twittery Thais

There are now two million Thais on Twitter, who on average tweet 5.5 times each day. Like with Facebook, the country’s Twitterers are night owls, tending to post more between 10pm and midnight. 66.7 percent of Twitter posts in Thailand are made on mobiles.

YouTube boom

YouTube is still seeing great growth in Thailand, and is now up to 630,000 channels within the nation, adding up to 5.3 million videos uploaded by Thai users. The top video cateogry for these guys and girls is music.

Snapping up Instagram

With the most stellar growth in Thailand in the past year, Instagram is now up to 600,000 users in the country, up from 150,000 this time last year. In the first four months of 2013, they collectively posted 21.38 million photos. One of the most liked users is @aum_patchrapa, the beauty queen turned actress Pachrapa ‘Aum’ Chaichua.

Checking out of Foursquare?

Foursquare, the location-based service, saw a nine percent drop in check-ins in the past year in Thailand, but the number of venues grew. The best growth figure for Foursquare was that 55 percent more people checked in via Instagram.

Line up

There are no Thailand-specific numbers from WeChat for Thailand, so let’s focus on rival app Line, which has a pretty spectacular 15 million Thai users. It’s also an important new platform for social marketing and brands outreach, with the top Thai brand on Line having 4.6 million followers already.

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

The report notes that the best newcomer, in the eyes of Chinese netizens, is Tottenham Hotspurs’ Gareth Bale. Interestingly, Spain’s La Liga players are a lot more popular than those in the English Premier League (BPL). La Liga’s top six most popular players on Weibo have eight times – yes, x8 – the number of followers compared to BPL’s top eight players.

One interesting thing to note is that Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata – who retired a few years back – is the fourth most popular European player on China’s leading social networks. Although he’s Japanese, he’s played in a few European clubs like AS Roma and Parma in the past.

The last time the Mailman Group, which helps celebrities do social marketing in China, assessed football mania on Weibo, it noted that European football clubs have 15.6 million supporters online in China.

Here’s the infographic for you football fans:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Brand24 then monitored the spikes in conversations that happened for local airlines Garuda Indonesia, Lion Air, and Batavia air. Garuda was mentioned a lot of times when South Korean pop groups 2PM, Sistar, and Infinite made their flights to Indonesia with the airline. But there were also spikes in terms of mentions for the wrong reasons. A Lion Air plane crashed just off Bali’s coast a few weeks back, while Batavia Air was in figurative deep waters regarding the company’s bankruptcy.

Monitoring these online conversations as well as the social sentiment among Indonesian netizens, Lion Air and Garuda Indonesia were discussed more than AirAsia Indonesia. At least in the past two months.

The same company released another infographic last month, which was about how social Jakarta folks really are.

Here is the infographic on the nation’s airlines on social media:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Japanese companies seem to be doing well in terms of social marketing, with drink-maker Ichitan coming out on top in Thailand, and bike-maker Yamaha revs up the most social media fans in Indonesia. But in Malaysia and the Philippines, two homegrown brands (Air Asia and Smart, respectively) are at the top of this ranking.

This combined count can be a bit unfair in some ways, as it punishes brands who opt to, say, avoid Instagram but have good numbers on other networks. An example is BlackBerry Indonesia, which is not in the ranking despite being one of the nation’s top Facebook brand pages with 26.7 million followers.

With all that in mind, here’s the full infographic, which also has some fun snippets about user behavior on brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Mobile apps are getting big everywhere, but it was just a few years ago that you might have been forgiven for thinking that India was still the land of feature phones. Well, no longer. Cheap smartphones and cheap mobile data plans have helped mobile apps take off in India in a big way. So what does the mobile app scene in India look like now? Thankfully the folks at Vserv have compiled an infographic that should answer a lot of your questions. Behold!

Like infographics like this? Well then you’re going to love all these posts with infographics in them. Aww yeah.

(via Vserv.mobi)

Newly activated Android devices really started to rocket in numbers last summer, the report notes. Across both platforms, smartphones are now so ingrained in the lives of Chinese mobile users that mobile app sessions rose 16-fold in 2012, with a 12-fold increase in the time spent within the apps that Umeng observed.

As well as lots of interesting demographics and app trends in the infographic, it also points out that iOS jailbreaking is on the decline in the long-run – down from 42.4 percent of Apple iOS gadgets in September 2012 to just 32.3 percent a few weeks ago. Here’s the full graphic:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

We’re always keeping our eyes out for interesting and surprising data about China’s games industry, and yesterday, we found a gold mine. A new report focused on China’s teen and twenty-something online gamers from iResearch and QQ Games has surveyed more than 5,000 gamers and done in-depth research on dozens more to present the most in-depth picture we’ve yet seen of young Chinese gamers’ demographics, habits, and desires.

It’s not all exactly what you’d expect, either. Mobile gaming is less popular with the youngsters than you might expect. Teen gamers spend more on up front fees and way less on in-game items than you’d think when listening to industry bigwigs blathering about “freemium” and the demise of the traditional pay-for-it-up-front game. Whether you’re a game developer or someone looking to market to Chinese gamers, there is real insight in this report. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Chinese, but there’s so much of value in there that I spent a whole day picking the report apart and creating the massive infographic you see below with some of the most interesting, useful, and surprising charts and statistics.

If you read Chinese, the full report is absolutely worth checking out, although be warned: it is long.

(Full Report Available Here, Chinese only)

Yes, South Korea now has 19 million daily active users on KakaoTalk, and Japan has 36 million active users on rival app Line. That’s according to the compiled statistics from social media agency WeAreSocial. When we looked at the overview from the same agency back in October last year, Cyworld was leading in Korea, and Twitter was top in Japan. But not any longer. WeAreSocial’s Simon Kemp explains to us that he decided to focus on active users on the social sites to give a clearer view of what people are using. He explains:

The (previous figure of) 26 million was total registered users on CyWorld, but we’re becoming increasingly aware that this does not represent active use. Also, the figures for KakaoTalk are daily active users, so the monthly active users (i.e. the figure Facebook reports) are likely to be much higher. Given that, we’re confident that KakaoTalk is now the most active network in South Korea.

Here’s the infographic map:

Overall, Asia now has 874 million social media users, according to Simon’s calculations. Despite the recalibration to active users, that’s still an 18 percent larger figure than was seen in last October’s data.

Of course, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is still growing in Asia, despite the rise of messaging apps and its recent clean-up of fake accounts. Nonetheless, some drops in Facebook active usage have been observed in Singapore, Brunei, and Hong Kong.

Aside from Line and KakaoTalk, the China-based WeChat app is still one to look out for. As we reported last night, the makers of that app, Tencent, are planning to test a social gaming platform within WeChat this year. When that eventually launches it’ll make the app an even stronger rival to Line and KakaoTalk, which are already benefitting from gaming integration.

On the whole, social media penetration remains at an average 23 percent across Asia:

(Source: WeAreSocial Singapore)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Of course, if you want to learn more about GREE, a good place to start would be this long interview we did with GREE founder Yoshikazu Tanaka.

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Along with those numbers, the data also shows that the largest section of China’s social media users – a full 30 percent – are aged 26 to 30. The perfect target for advertisers. As a whole, 91 percent of Chinese netizens have social accounts, which is way above the 67 percent in the US.

So what are those top 10 sites about? I’d categorize some of them like this:

• Twitter-like - In second and third place are the Twitter clones, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. The latter one gets most of the media attention, both in China and around the world.
• Facebook-y - Four of the sites are a lot like Facebook. Tencent’s QZone, Tencent’s Pengyou, Renren, and Kaixin are all focused around a mix of social profiles, albums, buddies, and social gaming. Interestingly, they don’t get so much hype these days, and feel rather like the past generation of sites on China’s web.
• Whatsapp-ish - The much talked about WeChat is like Whatsapp, and is one of a number of Asia-made messaging apps – like Line and KakaoTalk – that are battling to get onto the smartphones of young Chinese and Southeast Asian web users.

Here’s the full infographic:

(Source: Go Globe)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

I have to say, I’m not a big fan of the first half of this infographic, which is a little misleading. For instance, the Great Firewall exists just as much to block illegal content like gun sales websites as it does to block politically sensitive content. Moreover, the infographic implies that the Great Firewall blocks things like microblog posts, which it actually doesn’t — the vast majority of the time, objectionable posts are deleted by the content teams at the company that runs the microblogging service.

That said, the second half of the infographic — especially the part where it details visually how the Great Firewall works on a technical level — is quite helpful and definitely worth taking a gander at. If you’re wondering why sometimes you get a “connection reset” error and other times you get a “site not found” error in China, for example, this infographic will answer your questions:

Like infographics? We’ve got plenty more where this came from.

(via BackgroundCheck.org)

The figures suggest that China’s e-commerce scene will not grow exponentially in 2013, and growth will slow every year as the realistic saturation point is finally reached. While the growth in online shopping in the country was over 100 percent from 2011 to 2012, it’ll be down to just 22.8 percent expansion from 2015 to 2016. By 2015, Chinese e-tailers will be taking in 7.4 percent of China’s total retail value.

Aside from all the growth, the infographic gives a good summary of the current players [2] in the B2C e-commerce sector, which is dominated by Alibaba’s Tmall and the perhaps-soon-to-IPO 360Buy. There’s also market share info for e-payments providers in China, again dominated by an Alibaba company (Alipay), along with Tencent’s Tenpay. Here’s the full thing:

(Infographic source: Go-Globe)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Before looking at a few graphics put together by We Are Social (embedded in full below), here are some more stats from the e-tailing sector in China:

• 25 percent more online shoppers in China in 2012 from the previous year
• China has two-times more online shoppers than Japan; it has 75 million more than the US
• Older e-shoppers can’t be ignored, as five million of them in China are over 50 years of age
• There are 83.27 million shoppers on Groupon-style daily deals sites
• The total transaction value of all e-commerce in China in just Q3 2012 was US$319 billion, which amounts to $40,000 being spent per second in the country on the web.

Here are a few slides focusing on the market-leading Taobao (C2C) and Tmall (B2C) sites, which are both run by Alibaba Group, as well as some stats for mobile commerce in China:

Here’s the full report, starting at the e-commerce section:

(Source: WeAreSocial SG)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

The Chinese social media scene has, of course, seen huge growth alongside growing web penetration. 50.9 million new netizens were added in the country in 2012. There are now 597.6 million people (out of 1.34 billion in population) active on the nation’s top social network, QZone, which is made by local web giant Tencent). With 41 percent of the populace being under the age of 40, that’s good news for social networks – and social marketing – in China.

Before looking at the full report (embedded below), you might to see some of the standout slides. This is what they like to get up to online:

Focusing on social media in China, you’ll see that the Twitter-style Sina Weibo might be the most talked about, but it’s not the market leader as such:

As the full infographic report points out, Tencent’s QQ instant messenger app (which is linked to QZone) has the most number of active accounts, with a staggering 784 million active users per month. But then QQ numbers (aka: accounts) are about as ubiquitous here as phone numbers.

In terms of social marketing, it’s worth looking at the following few slides (starting at page 60 in the embed) to see the huge scope for engagement for brands in China, especially by having a presence on Sina Weibo:

You might also like to check out a different report about which overseas brands are doing the best social media marketing in China – and how they’re doing it.

Here’s the full presentation from We Are Social, which also ventures into mobile and e-commerce, in all its 200+ pages glory:

(Source: WeAreSocial SG)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

The WeChat messaging app seems to be China’s biggest social media export to date. But, apart from Tencent telling us that the “focus is Asia,” no one knows where WeChat is proving popular. Keen to find out where the app is doing well, the China-oriented consultants Value2020 have come up with this neat heatmap.

We’re told that the map is collated “based on app stores’ rankings” of WeChat, balanced by a “percentage of smartphones connected to the internet” in that country. While it’s far from an official way of tracking WeChat’s near 300 million user-base, it seems like a decent approach to find such elusive information. Of course, download numbers and app store tallies don’t equate to registered or active users, so that has to be thrown in there as a disclaimer.

In demand in India, Malaysia

The WeChat heatmap reveals that Tencent’s Asia strategy is paying off, with strong popularity for the app in places like Malaysia. Indeed, Tencent’s country manager for that area revealed a while back that WeChat has one million users in Malaysia, so that’s a useful, solid reference point. The Value2020 team says that India is actually the second-most popular area for WeChat outside of its native China. So long as the app’s censorship slip-up last week doesn’t put off overseas users, it looks like WeChat is building up a strong bulwark against Line and Whatsapp in some crucial, mobile-oriented markets.

In terms of recent trends, we’re informed that the messaging app is now growing even faster in India than it was last year, and it has been taking off in Spain, Mexico, and Argentina since last summer. Here’s the heatmap that Value2020 cooked up:

[Source: Value2020]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

KakaoTalk now has a team of 280 people, an increase from a team of 14 just three years ago. Its 70 million users spend an average of 302 minutes on KakaoTalk, a huge increase compared to back in July, when it was just 175 minutes. This surge might have been caused by the chat app’s new hit gaming platform which was launched in July.

There are 27 million daily unique visitors in its apps, sending 4.2 billion messages every day. It is interesting to note that according to AppAnnie, KakaoTalk’s position in Japan’s iOS free app section has jumped 102 spots to number five recently. That’s Line’s territory, of course, so it will be very interesting to see how it fares there. Check out Kakao’s infographic below:

Click to see it a bit bigger.

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

It’s the same story in lots of other areas. India added 37 million internet users in the past 12 months, but – at 137 million in total – that’s still just 11 percent penetration, three times below the global average. One fundamental reason behind this might be that 69 percent of Indians live in rural areas, and are often totally off the grid. And so, at present, 72 percent of the country’s web users live in urban areas.

All these updated stats for India have been compiled by Singapore social media agency WeAreSocial in its latest infographic report. This is the updated overview for the country:

India’s young web users – 75 percent of its netizens are below the age of 35 – mean that the social media boom is only just starting. That’s great news for Facebook, which saw 14.8 million new users in India in the past six months. India – in the absence of China, which blocks Facebook – could become the biggest Facebook user-base in the world, but for now it’s the third-largest:

Here’s the full infographic report in the form of a slideshow:

[Source: WeAreSocial Singapore]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Since we last looked at Cambodia’s web scene late last year, it has seen mobile subscribers nearly double so that there’s now 131 percent mobile penetration. As for 3G, a very encouraging 3.25 million are signed up to the quickest mobile data on offer, which is a pretty solid 16.5 percent of all mobile subscriptions. The number of internet users has leapt up by an even more extraordinary 548 percent, so that there are now 2.47 million connected online. This is likely due to seven new ISPs coming online in 2011 as Cambodia’s infrastructure slowly modernizes.

With 64 percent of the population being under 30 years of age, it’s no surprise that social media are a core online passtime. The Facebook Ad Planner suggests there are 690,520 social media users in Cambodia this month – not an enticingly huge draw for brands doing social marketing (compared to the 8.53 million social users in Vietnam this year), but it’s still a young and receptive audience. It’s surely also a country where Facebook is looking forward to seeing millions of new users. Here’s the full report in slideshow form:

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

After last week’s Asia-wide report on the state of the web, mobile, and social media, comes the infographic from digital agency WeAreSocial that focuses on Vietnam. The big news is that Facebook has overtaken Zing as Vietnam’s social network of choice – now Facebook has 8.5 million Vietnamese users, surpassing Zing’s 8.2 million in the country.

The WeAreSocial team notes that Facebook had a mere 2.9 million Facebook users in Vietnam last summer, so it’s seeing stellar growth among Vietnam’s very young and mobile netizens. But a note of caution: Zing’s self-reported figures are a little older than Facebook’s, so there’s still a chance for the homegrown service to regain its crown. After all, Zing is still growing from its 6.8 million figure last year.

Here’s the key slide from the infographic presentation showing Vietnam’s web scene:

Some highlights in Vietnam to look out for:

• Social media penetration of nine percent shows there’s massive room for growth
• 127.3 million mobile subscribers in total, which is above the population figure of 91.5 million
• 19 million mobile internet users, which works out at penetration of around 21 percent
• 35 percent of those user their phones to access social media
• 28 percent of Vietnamese netizens now have a Facebook account

And here is the full deck for you to browse:

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

All those stats are compiled by the folks at the Singapore branch of the WeAreSocial digital agency, who have just released their 2012 infographic report – see it here, or embedded below – that updates the series that we enjoyed so much last year.

Before you browse the whole set of infographic slides at the bottom of this post, here are a few key points on social media in Asia:

Yes, Facebook is still the region-wide king – not counting the massive weight of Chinese socal networks which tend to be used only in China. But Facebook’s throne is far from safe, we reckon, with more group messaging apps – like Whatsapp, KakaoTalk, Line, WeChat – ready to take away much of the activity that Facebook is used for. After all, the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps are not as good as many of its rivals in terms of facilitating simple and fun chatting with friends. OK, here’s the full slideshow:

[Source: We Are Social’s blog]

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Made by the folks at Thailand-based social analytics firm ZocialInc, it’s concocted using data from its ZocialRank system. The infographic shows that Thailand has the greatest number of high-ranking brands on social media (86 brands), and that the most liked/followed brand in the region is the Bali-based clothing retailer Surfer Girl, which is apparently living up to its claim of being a fun brand. It’s also got some killer social skills. Global brands in the top 10 include motorbike-maker Yamaha, AirAsia, BlackBerry, Nescafé, and Starbucks.

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

[Source: ZocialInc blog]

He points out what he calls Japan’s “old story” which saw high profile hardware manufacturers leading the world in producing quality electronics. Japan’s opportunity to stay out front as a leader, he notes, lies in retaining its culture of quality and applying it to mobile services, citing GREE (TYO:3632) and NHN Japan’s Line as key examples of services leading the way already.

I certainly agree that Japan, and certainly Korea, are already certainly breaking some new ground with interesting business models that they can test with consumers already comfortable with mobile payments. Although with regards to the common narrative that Japanese mobile manufacturing is a thing of the past as companies like Apple and Samsung soar, I would like to point to an argument recently made by our friends at Wireless Watch, who figure that Japanese companies still produce about 40 percent of the components used in all the world’s mobile phones.

Check out Roman’s graphic below, and let us know what you think.

The results have been prettified and portrayed in the infographic below. Some of the social highlights out of Thailand include:

• Spain got about double the amount of Twitter mentions by Thai footie fans before, during, and after the match. Clearly they know how to pick a winner!

• The most mentioned player was Spain’s Torres, who scored [UPDATE: Oops!] three the third of the nation’s four goals in the final.

• The major brands backing UEFA’s Euro cup this year didn’t fare too well, with only three percent of Thai football viewers mentioning any of the major brands involved, such as Honda or McDonald’s.

• Instead, Euro 2012 viewers in Thailand were too busy discussing the practicalities of seeing the game via “หนวดกุ้ง” (traditional antenna TV) or via GMMZ.

• The social peak of Euro 2012 among the Thai viewers came as the first goal hit the net at 2:01am local time.

Here’s Zocialrank’s Euro 2012 finale graphic in full:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

[Source: Zocial Inc blog]

Here’s a useful infographic showing where the Chinese web is at in mid-2012, with all the updated stats for how many folks are online, and new social media user figures for a dozen of the nation’s most popular services.

Made for us by the folks over at BestFreeOnline, it highlights how Chinese net users are some of the world’s most social, with 91 percent of them in a sample survey saying that they’d visited a social media site in the past six months. By comparison, only 87 percent of Americans have done the same.

Tencent’s QZone remains the country’s most-used social site, featuring the web profiles and photo albums that are complementary to the Tencent (HKG:0700) QQ instant-messaging platform. Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, as China’s hottest Twitter-like site, is growing at an amazing pace, recently surpassing 300 million registered users and now standing at 324 million.

Further down in the infographic, also look out for some amazing e-commerce revenue projections for 2015, sourced from our reporting on the subject earlier this month:

[Source: BestFreeOnline]

We know that Thais love Instagram – and, for some reason, using the photo-sharing app to photograph Suvarnabhumi airport more than any other place – and now we have some stats to attach to its popularity. The Bangkok-based brand agency Zocialrank has made the pretty infographic you see below with the key stats: more than 150,000 local users on Instagram who have uploaded just over 11 million photos.

Thai celebrities are a key part of this success for Instagram. The most followed of which within the service is Chermarn Boonyasak (see her photo collection here) with 314,793 followers from around the world at present. Fellow actress Pachrapa Chaichua is a close second. Nine out of 10 of the most followed Thais on Instagram are (very attractive showbiz) females – I’m guessing that’s due to a mix of women fans and male voyeurs.

Check out the full list in the infographic, and also see which filters are preferred by the nation’s smartphone snappers.

[Source: Zocial Inc blog]

A fresh snapshot of Asia’s social media landscape reveals which service dominates in each country – and it’s especially good news for Facebook, which has added more than 20 million users across Asia in the past six months.

The infographic and its stats were put together by the Singapore-based branding and PR agency WeAreSocial. It points out that Facebook now has more than 192 million users across the 24 main Asian wired nations.

The only countries that prefer a different social network are China (where Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QZone dominates), Vietnam (Zing), South Korea (CyWorld), and Japan (Twitter). In the latter country, Japanese social network Mixi has been struggling and is now getting swamped by both Facebook and Twitter.

In China, Tencent’s Qzone looks monstrously huge, but its user numbers have dropped by five million since we last checked on the Asian social media scene last year. That squeeze will have been caused by increasingly popular microblogs (weibo), such as those from Sina and Tencent itself.

Here’s the current view across the region, with the newest site-reported stats that are available for each country (click to enlarge):

Check out which social networks are the most popular in each nation in Asia (May 2012) - Click to enlarge.

[Source: WeAreSocial blog]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Mobile ad platform InMobi has been busy these past few days crunching ad impressions stats from across Asia, giving us insights into growing smartphone usage in various countries. Now it’s Hong Kong’s turn, where mobile advertising grew 656 percent from Q4 2010 to the same period at the end of 2011. But the picture in Hong Kong is a bleak one for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), whose iOS presence in the Chinese SAR fell 16.1 percent; in contrast, Android seemed to grow by a staggering 36.8 percent, and is now the dominant mobile OS in Hong Kong by some margin.

Smartphones as a whole now account for 80 percent of all of InMobi’s observed advertising impressions, squeezing down features-phones – or “advanced phones” as the company calls them – from 38 percent at the end of 2010 down to just 20 percent at the end of 2011.

It’s all in interesting contrast to InMobi’s stats for Vietnam, which we looked at last week – but of course, Hong Kong is a technologically much more advanced market.

There’s also good news for Samsung (005930:KS) in there, as it now has the first- and third-most popular phone in Hong Kong. Here’s the full infographic, which you can click to enlarge:

InMobi says that of the more than six billion ad impressions it served in Q4 2011, 5.6 billion were on feature phones [1], and only 0.4 billion were on smartphones. For those of us who live in more mature markets, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to find that Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) is the dominant phone manufacturer in the market, one which is still dominated by feature phones. As you can see below, even though Nokia is the dominant handset maker by far, its market share is shrinking, while Samsung (005930:KS) and other Android phones appear to be on the rise, but Android still only accounts for 2.6 percent of the market overall.

Vietnamese users also differ in their media consumption habits, as mobile is their preferred media channel (35 percent of their daily media time), over television (25 percent) and PC (18 percent), according to a survey conducted by InMobi [2]. The company’s regional director and general manger in Southeast Asia, Phalgun Raju, noted that an upswing in mobile online shopping can be expected in Vietnam as well:

Our survey found that three-quarters of mobile web users in Vietnam have been influenced by mobile advertising when making purchases… In addition, we also found that 77 percent of consumers expect to conduct mobile commerce in the next 12 months – a 36 percent increase from where we are today.

Check out more details in infographic below, which nicely illustrates these important changes happening in Vietnam’s mobile sector.

A new infographic shows that Chinese will soon overtake English as the dominant language online. At the end of 2011, 27 percent of web content was in English, while 24 percent was in Chinese. Despite that, the graphic’s creators, the translation management platform Smartling, lament that the web is still too monolingual, with “56 percent of online content [being] English-only.” It calls for a more multilingual approach to the web.

We’ve taken the liberty of using some of the main images from the infographic and put them below, but you really want to check out the full thing in all its interactive and multilingual glory on the Smartling site.

First up, here’s how the web stands in Asia right now, with this region accounting for 45 percent of all the world’s web users, even though only 26 percent of the 3.5 billion people based in Asia are yet online. That’s room for some amazing growth:

The three-layer pie chart below shows the spread of languages on the web in 2000, 2005, and then 2011. In the past decade, English has shrunk from being 39 percent of all internet content down to just 27 percent at the end of 2011. It is still the lingua franca (boy, that must annoy the French) online but now by a tiny margin: it leads over Chinese – badged as ZH, which is short for Zhong wen – by just 3 percent:

Clearly, Chinese is going to overtake English as the web’s number one language very soon. At its current rate of growth, that could well happen by mid-2014. Its growth has been stellar in the past 11 years, when most other languages have been static – that’s obviously because so few of its populace was online before. Today it’s still a fairly long way from its saturation point.

Other languages are getting proportionally squeezed, such as the drop in the global share of Japanese, which is now at 8 percent and has been static since 2005. But, last year when we looked at languages used on global social media such as Twitter, we noticed the greater prevalence of Japanese, Korean, and Bahasa Indonesia.

[Source: Smartling]

Serkan just sent us a long a wonderful graphical overview of Japan’s social gaming space, created by Tokyo-based designer Francesco Romano. Appropriately, it’s designed with a fun game motif, which I thought was rather clever. In terms of financials, some of the numbers here are pretty astronomical. Serkan points out that this is ‘almost entirely’ from Japanese users.

If you’re interested in keeping tabs on the social gaming in Japan, do follow Serkan on his blog where he often writes about the latest development in that space. He recently posted a short discussion on the possibility of regulation coming to the industry.

You can check out the full infographic below, and if you’d like to post it on your own blog, the embed code is here.

Embed code:

<div class="infogra_embed"><a href="http://j.mp/n5ujfE" target="_blank"><img src="http://infogra.me/saved/images/infograph/b1/d2/12f9279898525af799ce71fe2468b1d2.626x4564.cut.jpg" alt="Japan Social Gaming Market Vol. 1 Apr-May 2012"/></a> <div class="infogra_embed_via"><span>via: <a href="http://infogra.me/" target="_blank">Infogra.me</a></span></div> </div> <p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://infogra.me/static/embed/embed.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://infogra.me/static/embed/style.css" />

Here’s a very handy cheat-sheet – created by CIC, the Chinese social business analysts – showing you the leading Chinese web services in each category alongside their western counterparts.

The CIC ‘social media landscape’ for 2012 infographic has all bases covered, from local dating networks like Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE), social review sites like Dianping, and the most popular aggregator reading apps such as Zaker. Those are the popular equivalents to Match, Yelp, and Flipboard respectively.

Of course, the Chinese web is not a total parallel universe – there are still some much-loved foreign social media services here such as MSN, Skype, and, er… well, that’s it really.

For CIC’s future reference, it’d be good to add in some other popular categories next time, such as hugely popular photo-sharing apps (eg: Tuding as a local usurper of Instagram) or up-and-coming social video apps as well. But those are missing for now. Perhaps a task for Ogilvy, which does a very similar – not sure who conceived of this first! – ‘digital influence’ circle every year. (Here’s Ogilvy’s for 2011).

Without further ado, here’s CIC’s new creation embedded as a PDF (or Chinese readers can click the source link below) so that you can zoom in and explore it full-size:

[Source: CIC blog - article in Chinese]

When we looked at the most recent stats last month for the group-buy market in mainland China, we noticed some interesting phenomena, such as the top three sites – Meituan, 55Tuan, and Lashou – now look like an established hierarchy, and movie tickets were the hottest leisure deals.

And now the source of those stats, the aggregator and deals analysts DaTaoTuan, has made an infographic showing why movie coupons are such an important differentiator for a daily deals site, potentially bringing in over half a million sales worth over 10 million RMB (US$1.58) to a single company. Movie ticket deals now account for 13.4 percent of all revenue in the mainland China group-buying sector.

In summary, before looking at the infographic below, it seems that Meituan and 55Tuan are making the biggest piles of celluloid-derived cash, with Meituan bringing in 13 million RMB ($2.06 million) in the space of nine days with its movie deals across 44 Chinese cities. The infographic astutely points out that cinema tickets are way expensive compared to the usual pirated DVDs here – like, 70 RMB tickets versus 7 RMB discs – so big discounts are proving to be a great way for deals sites to bring in new customers and reconnect with old ones as well.

[Source: DaTaoTuan’s blog]

Scroll down to check out some of the more interesting conference statistics in an infographic, ranging from participants to digital media conversations. If you’re interested, you can also head over here to read all the positive feedback we have gathered so far over email.

Special thanks and a shoutout to Piktochart (also one of the our Arena pitchers) for taking time to create the infographic. Embed code is below if you’d like to re-publish.

Embed code:

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/fuHZV.jpg" title="Startups in Asia (Singapore) 2012 in an Infographic" width="700" height="3885">

Over the past few weeks we’ve been taking a look back on 2011 and the major stories and trends that stood out. In China, this was an especially big year for online shopping and ecommerce.

For a few key facts and figures [1] about how this corner of China’s internet industry is growing, check out the following graphic that I’ve put together on the subject.

There has been a bit of a fad on the internet in recent days for posts about amazing things that happen online in just one minute, and so the Chinese site 17Startup made one about the web scene in China. The numbers were so awesome that we felt it was worth whacking the infographic into an image editor in order to translate it into English.

It shows that insane amounts of money – and a great deal of content – flows from the fingers of Chinese internet users every sixty seconds. The hugest number is the amount of ads that Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) serves every minute, and just how much is spent on e-commerce site Taobao:

(Click to enlarge a bit)

If that’s compared with the recent – and more glossy – pair of infographics from web design company Go-Globe.com (via this blog), which looks at the worldwide scene, we see China’s numbers stack up favorably in many instances.

For example, as you see below, Xiaomi’s Android-powered M1 phones seem to be outselling all of RIM’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) Blackberry handsets, and Twitter’s 98,000 tweets per minute pale in comparison to the firing of missives from Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo.com:

(Click to enlarge a bit)

(Click to enlarge a bit)

[Chinese infographic source: 17startup, via Toumingti - articles in Chinese]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Singapore has always punched above its size in the world’s economy, and so it’s no surprise that its citizens are so wired and engaged with gadgets and social media. Indeed, the island state has the highest concentration of smartphones anywhere in the world, and over three-quarters of its citizens access the web every single day.

Singaporeans are social on the web, too, with people there spending about one hour each day engaging with other folks online – mostly on Facebook. (Though Brunei’s netizens take the title of being Asia’s most social when on the web).

Here’s the We Are Social infographic slideshow for Singapore as part of its ‘social, digital, mobile Asia’ series:

And that’s a wrap on our coverage of We Are Social’s excellent overview of the Asian web, mobile, and social scene as it stands at the end of 2011. Catch the previous seven infographics and slideshows on this tag.

But the Singaporean social marketers still have a few more reports to share from other countries in the region, such as Thailand, and Pakistan, so hit the source link below to follow their blog.

[Source: We Are Social]

Across Asia, countries seem to be split into those who’re well hooked-up to the high-speed web, and those who access instead from mobiles and PC cafés – with only mainland China somewhat torn between those two states of being.

But in the Greater China area, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau are certainly in the first group – enjoying high rates of internet penetration on an uncensored web whilst also having over 100 percent phone ownership, many of which are smartphones.

That’s the picture painted by We Are Social’s new report on the three areas, which is part of its marathon survey of 24 countries across the region.

Some other highlights from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau include the facts that 35 percent of HK folks own smartphones, and 56 percent of them use their devices to search the web every single day; Taiwan has the world’s most active blog readers and BBS users; and in tiny Macau, more women than men are using Facebook, which bucks the general trend across Asia. Here are the three full slideshows:

Hong Kong

Taiwan

Macau

Check out all the posts in this Asia-wide series, or hit the source link below to see We Are Social’s analysis as well.

[Source: We Are Social]

And this year's Android winner in China is... Samsung! Especially this Galaxy S, which seems to be China's hottest Android smartphone this year.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

The Chinese mobile analytics company Umeng has released new stats which give us a clear picture of the Android user-base and the devices being used in China.

It shows us that in Q3 2011 Samsung (005930.KS) and HTC (TPE:2498) dominated the Android scene here, together accounting for about 53 percent of all phone traffic detected by Umeng. Bizarrely, it also reveals that Android tablets have become less popular this quarter, with decreased usage from Q2 to Q3.

Umeng only covers apps which utilize its mobile ad network – which we reviewed before – so this is not a measure of sales, more of active usage. But that’s actually fine, as it covers over 10,000 common apps that are downloadable from a range of sources and alternative Android app stores. And so it gives a pretty representative view.

Android Tablets vs Android Phones
Yes, Android tablets – which seem to be as popular as stale cakes – saw even less usage in China in Q3. The Ionesco-esque rhinocéros in the room is that the iPad is still booming, whilst Android tablets are not quite so appealing to consumers. Meanwhile, in the graph on the right, we see the top ten Android phone brands in China:

Phone Models
Samsung’s GT-I9100 – better known as the Galaxy S – is the most popular single model of Android phone in China. Huawei snuck into a surprise second place with its cheap but low-end C8650:

Tablet Models
Another victory for Samsung in terms of tablet models, with its seven-inch Galaxy Tab taking the top spot. It’s another home-grown competitor in second place, but this time it’s from Lenovo (HKG:0992):

Powerful Androids
It seems people are more likely to have really powerful tablets than phones. The processor speed (the CPU) of most phones is spread quite evenly, suggesting a broad price range of devices. The afore-mentioned Galaxy S phone has a 1 GHz CPU, making it pretty speedy:

Phone Screen Resolution
Further indication that many people in China are on budget handsets comes from the fact that about 40 percent of people are using phones with a resolution of 320 by 480 pixels or less. Higher rez screens, such as seen on the new Motorola MT917 for China are creeping in slowly, meaning that local developers need to remember to create more detailed graphics for apps and games:

Tablet Screen Resolution
Here’s the same scenario amongst tablet users here:

Pricey vs Cheap
From looking at the models that are on the Umeng network, the company has figured what kind of money people are currently spending on their Androids:

Across China
No surprises here, where the richest areas in China show the most usage of these smartphones and tablets. In descending order, the provinces are: Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Beijing, and Shanghai, which are highlighted in that blue rectangle:

How Has All That Changed From 2010?
Good question, dear reader. Looking back at Umeng’s report from Q4 2010, we see that Motorola (NYSE:MMI) and HTC had the most popular models. So it has not been too great a year for either of those to have been usurped by Samsung in 2011. Here’s the old view from 2010:

Download the full reports – and others from the archive – from Umeng at the link below.

[Source: Umeng report - page and report in Chinese]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Motivated. Dynamic. Innovative. Three much-used – indeed, overused – adjectives on many people’s CVs. There are other resumé regulars, too – such as “interpersonal skills,” “track record” – that have become cliché and tiresome, used unthinkingly, and which are blasts from the past that really ought to be avoided like the plague and used few and far between. D’oh!

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), the business-oriented social network, has picked through the buzzwords on the profiles of its 135 million users worldwide and found which words and phrases and most overused in each region. Users in Singapore seem most fond of the term “track record” in a presumed bid to show that they are long-serving experts in their fields.

Before looking at the infographic, LinkedIn got Chan Ngee Key, a career Coach and strategist at YourOwn360, to give some advice to users on avoiding such trite turns of phrase:

Competition for opportunities can be fierce, so craft your LinkedIn profile to stand out from the professional pack. Some objectives you should keep in mind are: Banish buzzwords from your profile. Use language that illustrates your unique professional accomplishments and experiences. Give concrete examples of results you’ve achieved whenever possible and reference attributes that are specific to you.

Singapore’s top ten trotted-out buzzwords are:

1. Track record
2. Motivated
3. Effective
4. Creative
5. Dynamic
6. Innovative
7. Problem solving
8. Communication skills
9. Extensive experience
10. Interpersonal skills

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are areas that don’t get too much coverage in the tech press – but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting phenomena in the way its web and tech scene are developing.

Vietnam is especially one to watch, with a fledgeling start-up scene empowered by game-development successes that are attracting a lot of investment from Japan.

Across these three countries, mobile is proving especially revolutionary – getting people not just talking, but also online. It’s a situation we’re seeing, too, in India and Indonesia. Following that path, we’re likely to see Cambodia and Laos pick up social media, e-commerce, and gaming almost exclusively on mobile, not on desktop PCs. Vietnam’s infrastructure, though, fares somewhat better.

To read the full analysis, head on over to the We Are Social blog where they also have the slideshow. Here are the three reports in full:

Vietnam

Cambodia

Laos

You might like to check out our previous four articles from this infographic series.

[Source: We Are Social]

To commemorate its 10 billion apps milestone, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has released a great infographic which shows more details about Android’s astounding achievements. Now with over one billion app downloads every 30 days, Android’s growth shows no signs of slowing. And according to Google, Asia sits at the core of that growth.

Their graphic shows that four of the top five “app-crazed countries” [1] are in Asia: South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. The USA comes in at number four (see below).

We’ve also seen that Android’s growth in Japan is strong as well, with higher growth trajectory than iOS when last we checked – though the iPhone 4S may have thrown those numbers for a loop.

Anyway, you can check out Google’s infographic in full below, which also touches on the top app categories, and other interesting factoids.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

India and China are often mentioned in the same breath, as Asia’s powerhouse economies. But on the web, the two countries are developing very differently, with India’s younger demographics – half the nation is under the age of 25 – making the best of poor broadband infrastructure by going online and engaging in social media on their mobiles instead. And that’s great, because the web needn’t be trapped inside a weighty, underpowered old desktop PC.

But while India’s internet landscape is a lot freer than China’s, there are other extant issues, such as terrible broadband infrastructure – which has pushed forward the importance of mobiles – that sees a mere two percent of rural Indians on the internet. Plus, there’s a massive gender imbalance in terms of web access, skewed 70:30 towards males – that’s even more of a problem than in Indonesia, which we looked at last week.

For the full report, hit the We Are Social site to view it as a slideshow. But right now, here are 12 of the hottest infographics plucked out of it for your browsing pleasure…

Mobile Me

With 72 percent of India’s populace living in rural areas, it should be no surprise that this report, compiled of up-to-date information from numerous sources (including from PO), finds that 31 percent of them have never heard of the internet. On the bright side, Indian startups such as SMS GupShup are bringing some in-depth services to people on feature-phones who don’t have web access.

Internet adoption is growing fast, though. Perhaps of more concern going forward is how disproportionately male are India’s netizens:

Social

And, to round off our look at India’s web scene, social media is flourishing amongst India’s younger web users – but the nationwide social networking penetration is just at three percent (see the first image above), compared to 40 percent in China.

Businesspeople, who are likely more able to get online, are jumping about professional social networks – LinkedIn’s (NYSE:LNKD) Indian users are its second-largest user-base in the world. But let’s focus mostly on Facebook:

There are some slides above that provide even greater insights when compared side-by-side with the same survey reports produced on China or on Indonesia.

See the full 45-slide presentation at the source link below.

[Source: We Are Social blog]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

The Asia-oriented branding and PR agency We Are Social has just released its report on all that’s happening in social, digital, and mobile in China. It’s a monster of a slideshow presentation, befitting the region’s biggest web and mobile users.

Did you know that there are currently 10 million new internet users in China each month – adding to the ranks of Chinese netizens that are already more numerous than the populace of Europe – and that they spend an average of 150 minutes online each day?

The full presentation is on the We Are Social site, and runs to 55 slides. But here are ten of the key slides picked out to form a vertical infographic, and focusing on social media and e-commerce. Get your scrolling finger ready…

Big Red

The report finds that Chinese web users see the medium as much more engaging than either TV or radio. But that doesn’t stop an amusing 87 percent of netizens from also watching TV at the same time…

Social Media Mavens

The social media boom in China in the past decade has been monumental, and there’s still ample room for growth, as the over 200 percent growth in microblogging this year has shown. For now, though, let’s focus on some numbers, and also highlight the biggest overseas social success in China – the business-oriented Tianji SNS:

Checkout E-Commerce

E-commerce, has been game-changing in China as well, and is now worth over US$100 billion per year. It’s creating a stronger culture of customer service where user-feedback and a seller’s rating is crucial, as exemplified by how many people read comments before making a purchase:

You might like to see our previous infographics in this series – the Asia-wide one, and the Indonesia special report. Hit the source link below for the full slideshow of today’s China presentation.

[Source: We Are Social]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Indonesia’s web users are remarkable in that they tend to be very young, social, and mobile. To celebrate this, the first We Are Social country-by-country report of 24 nations across Asia focuses on Indonesia. And here it is.

Coming after last week’s Asia-wide analysis, this time we get a clear portrait of how more than half of Indonesia’s internet users are younger than 20 years of age, and that 66 percent of all desktop web access is from internet cafés. But that’s where mobile fills the breach…

As before, the full slideshow presentation is on the We Are Social site, and here’s a selection of some of the hottest stats:

Young, Mobile, But Too Male

The only issue with what’s going on in the country’s vibrant webosphere is that it’s far too skewed towards males.

The fact that people use their mobiles more to get online, however, is actually good news, as it means they’re sort of skipping merrily past the cumbersome PC era. The report tells us that 61 percent of all internet usage in Indonesia is from mobile devices. It’s also allowing the youth to be more social, and has created a preference for DMs over emails:

Indo <3 Facebook & Twitter

Speaking of social, let’s focus solely on Facebook and Twitter. With a full 89 percent of all the nation’s web users visiting social media sites, it’s no surprise that Facebook Pages are big news for brands in the region. Facebook users in the country are a bit more balanced out along gender lines – 60:40 – than the general web populace.

As for Twitter, We Are Social says that the SNS is increasingly becoming a BBM replacement in Indonesia, which would be very bad news for RIM (NASDAQ:RIMM). That’s why there are nearly 1.3 million new tweets from its netizens each day, which is about 15 per second:

Hooked On the Web

Lastly, the country’s internet users are, of course, doing plenty of other things on the web, such as greasing the wheels of business on LinkedIn (860,000 users in Indonesia), or posting to their ‘ole-fashioned blogs (nearly 5.3 million of those in the country). Plus…

Look out for a few more of these in the coming days and weeks, as we peer more closely into some of the nations that PO covers most often, such as Japan, China, India, and Singapore. Check out the full Indonesia presentation at the source link below.

[Source: We Are Social blog]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Branding and PR agency We Are Social has created a vital and up-to-date overview of all that’s happening in social, digital, and mobile in Asia. It was made to answer some frequently reoccurring questions from its clients, and to give everyone a good-looking primer on what’s happening on the web in 24 nations across the region.

The full 56-page presentation is available on the We Are Social site, and is recommended viewing. The team will follow this up with specific studies on each country in the coming weeks. But I thought it’d be fun to take some choice cuts from its first release, and make it into an easily scrollable infographic for those in a hurry…

Mostly Rural, Mostly Mobile

Of Asia’s 3.715 billion populace, 58 percent still live in rural areas, and this is creating a tendency towards mobile web usage – skewed especially by India and Indonesia – with an Asia-wide 24 percent rate of internet penetration compared to 74 percent on mobile subscriptions. And as we have seen in India and Indonesia – such as with SMS GupShup – a lack of smartphone uptake is no barrier to getting online whilst on the move.

Plus, the number who intend to make online purchases in the next six months (not pictured) indicates how the growing middle-classes hold the key to the web’s greatest profit potential:

Who’s The Most Social?

With a purported three quarters of a billion social media users across Asia, how does that break down by countries and services? Although social networking penetration is highest in Brunei and Hong Kong, it’s actually Indonesia and the Philippines who are in a tie for first place for the jolly title of “most social” country in Asia.

In terms of services, China’s Tencent (HKG:0700) and Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) are the clear leaders. Tencent’s QZone – a social profile page that’s linked to its ubiquitous QQ instant-messenger – is three times bigger than Facebook across the region, even though its usage is mostly just in the Greater China area:

China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Singapore

Until the We Are Social team releases its detailed studies for each country, let’s look at the five we cover most frequently on PO:

Hit the source link below for the full presentation.

[Source: We Are Social's blog]

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Market research firm Synovate has some new insights into Chinese netizens usage of the web – how it differs between poorer and richer cities, that more people than ever in China go online on their mobiles, how e-commerce has exploded even in less prosperous cities, and that the internet has (for the first time) surpassed television in terms of engagement levels.

It’s a part of Synovate’s Media Atlas China study, which surveyed 66,000 consumers across 88 ‘tier one’ to ‘tier five’ cities and rural areas across mainland China. Before we get to the meat on the bones, we have to gnaw at the gristle of what exactly constitutes these levels of cities.

So here’s a quick primer on China’s cities:

The tier one megacities are the likes of Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, while tier two cities are wealthy provincial capitals like Hangzhou, and Nanjing. Tier three urban areas have a moderate GDP level and are pretty large; then tier four and five cities are noticeably smaller and poorer, but very numerous. All those 645 cities together comprise China’s urban spread, and account for just over 611 million of its populace.

More Fun Than TV

The study found something of a milestone in the internet’s growth in China:

The latest index shows internet overtook all other media as the most engaging. It has the highest engagement score of 77, followed by television with an index score of 73, and mobile with the score of 68.

That greater preference for the web is even more pronounced in China’s largest cities:

The engagement index of tier one [city] consumers is 82 for internet versus 77 for TV, while tier five consumers indicated index scores of 76 for internet and 73 for TV.

But remarkably, some smaller cities surpassed megacities in terms of its peoples’ online usage, although those were mostly sporadic.

Nationwide, the average amount of time spent online was 163 minutes, with those in China’s four megacities spending more time doing so, and being more likely to do it daily.

On Weibo, On Mobile

The report’s authors claim that “one in four Chinese urbanites aged 15 to 64 are now on Weibo.” Indeed, last week’s updated stats from China’s two major microblogging platforms, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent (HKG:0700), seem to back this up. Breaking it down by location and age, we get a clearer picture of the impact of Twitter-esque social media:

Almost half (45 percent) of the younger generation in tier one, two and three cities use Weibo, while one in three youngsters in lower-tier cities are already there.

E-Commerce Explosion

Good news for the likes of Tmall, QQ Buy, and Vancl – the huge e-commerce explosion in China is spread remarkably evenly across the country. Indeed, residents of tier two cities are the most keen on buying clothes, shoes, and accessories online. That indicates to e-commerce portals and brands that they’d be wise to heed stats like these, and perhaps spend more money advertising in, say, Hangzhou, and less in nearby Shanghai.

It seems that only in terms of purchasing books and magazines online do the megacity inhabitants outrank other areas. That’s pleasing news for Dangdang and Amazon.

One more eye-watering detail:

Overall, one in seven (14 percent) Chinese urbanites has shopped online in the past month, while 11 percent in tier five cities have done so. Given the vast number of tier five cities and their population, this translated to a 49 percent market share of online shopping by consumers in tier five cities alone.

Remember that all those inhabitants of China’s so-called poorer cities make up nearly half of all China’s city-dwelling folk.

[Source: Synovate]

As of 2010, at age 33, Yoshikazu Tanaka, founder of GREE, was ranked as “Asia's Youngest Self-Made Billionaire” under the age of 35.

We have covered much about GREE on our blog. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some lost souls are still confused about what GREE is doing (subscribe to our feed if you’re one of them) even though it has 130 million users worldwide and over 850 million in reach. You may also not be clear on exactly how it has been generating income through mobile gaming.

I stumbled upon a neat report by the Japanese mobile gaming social network which shared some interesting diagrams to help explain its business better to the public.

And I thought it would be a good idea to arrange them to create an infographic to help people understand the company better.

Fyi, we are also currently working on an infographic featuring DeNA, GREE’s competitor.

Also see infographics on: Alibaba Group, Rakuten.

Earlier this week we reported on the latest massive user number updates from Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. And while we’re a little bit suspicious of these self-reported user counts, the numbers are still pretty amazing.

So, we thought we’d have some fun with them and see how they compare to the populations of different countries! The results are below. Enjoy!

(For those curious, we made this infographic with Cacoo, who we have written about before).

A report from New Cities Foundation says that passengers in most (60 percent) of the world’s largest subway systems can access internet. In Asia specifically, access appears far better than the world average as South Korean and Chinese users can connect in 100 percent of major subway systems. This compares to 56 percent in the EU, and 41 percent in the US and Canada. Eastern Europe and Central Asia lag behind at about 25 percent.

It’s important to note here that ‘access’ is defined as ‘the possibility to connect to the internet,’ and not publicly open wi-fi. Tokyo, where I live, has been referred to as a wi-fi wasteland, and internet is generally accessible in most places so long as you pay (which I do, using a pocket wi-fi device). The report says Japan’s rate of access from subways is 87.5 percent.

Nevertheless, the NCF’s executive director Mathieu Lefevre notes:

[I]t says a lot that Asian commuters can check their email and read the news in more than 80 % of the region’s subway systems, compared to just half than in North America.

Readers may recall that we interviewed Tianji CEO Derek Ling back in June about his fast-growing social professional social network. When we spoke with him at that time, the service was doing pretty good with 6 million registered users.

This morning Tianji released an infographic further summarizing its growth (now at 8 million users) and its business. Derek is in attendance at TechCrunch Disrupt, so we should have some further updates from him later in the day.

Ogilvy’s Asia Pacific arm has recent republished its ‘China Social Media Equivalants’ chart. One of the most notable changes since the last time the group published this graphic is in the SNS/Microblogging section, where a couple of Weibos (Sina and Tencent) straddle both classifications.

The graphic is pretty solid, I think, with our only suggested addition being social games. But then again, is there a Chinese answer to a company like Zynga? Not yet, anyway.

Ogilvy’s chart is a little hard to fit in a blog post, so we’ve made it zoomable so you can get in a little closer. Alternatively, you can see entire static image here.

To learn more, drop over to Asia Digital Map for more details.

A brand-new report by analytics company Umeng reveals a whole bunch of interesting facts and stats about iPhone and iPad usage and adoption in China, and how iOS is taking off across the country.

We all know that China has a huge taste for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) products, so it’s good to have updated figures to match to that. This data was collated up to 2011 Q2 from online usage of around 3,000 domestic iOS apps, which Umeng then analysed by device, location, time, and type of apps being used. I’ve picked out seven of the most interesting pages, and broken them down with a translation-cum-commentary.

iPhone model upgrades - First up, here’s the proportional growth in different iPhone models in China, from the start of this year up to the end of June. Last summer’s new model, the iPhone 4, grew to an eventual 83.4 percent (or 83.8, including the later-issued CDMA variant), showing a strong preference for newer models in the country. The new-for-2009 3GS model is already astonishingly thin on the ground here. I’ll be curious to see if the new iPhone 4S sets the same rate of upgrades by next summer – although that’s perhaps more unlikely given its identical form-factor:

iPad model upgrades - The same analysis of the iPad in China reveals keen adoption of newer models as well, but the later release of the iPad 2 – in March of this year – means that the original Apple slate is still out in force. In total, it looks like the new iPad 2 in all its variants accounts for 59.7 percent of Chinese users, with the original iPad on 40.2:

iOS software updates - With so many people here upgrading their Apple devices annually – and with fairly easy updates in iTunes – it’s not too surprising to see the majority of people using the newest version of the software back in June, which was iOS 4.3. That was only released in March, so it had a swift rise – in just three months – to be on 69.3 percent of iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch models by the summer:

Apple device usage by province - Across China, iOS usage is concentrated around the country’s wealthier southern and eastern coastal provinces. Just five areas – Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong – account for 50.5 percent of usage in this survey. Down at the bottom of the chart is the massive but isolated Tibetan region, which has only 0.1 percent of Chinese iOS users:

iOS vs Android; and iOS devices per capita - Following on from that map above, this chart shows adoption of iOS verses Android. It’s interesting to see that Guangdong province, whose people have the most Apple mobile devices, are even bigger fans of Android, Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) mobile OS. But, in the other four wealthy regions, more tablets and smartphones are rocking iOS. In general across China, Android has a slight lead.

On the chart on the right, we see that Beijing has the greatest number of iOS devices per capita:

Types of iOS apps used - For the sixth page, let’s look at the time of apps being used. The chart on the left breaks it down to a week, while the one on the right shows the flow during a single, average day:

iPhone vs iPad usage - Lastly, we see that iPhones and iPads tend to be used in China more at varying times of day. I suspect this might be a global phenomenon, as people reach for a larger screen when they get home in the evening and when they’re relaxing at the weekends:

[Source: Umeng; Umeng’s report as PDF download]

The good folks at ReferralCandy, a referral marketing platform, have alerted us to a gorgeous infographic they have created (see below). A company rep says that they were intrigued by the growth of e-commerce in India and wanted to see what the hype was about. Its research eventually led to the infographic below, neatly summarized and designed.

Although e-commerce in India is growing rapidly, it is now just one-16th of the size of the U.S e-commerce Industry. But given the huge population in the country (1.2 billion), India has far greater potential than the U.S — a $500 billion potential in the industry.

The country’s potential is also factored in by building blocks such as the number of Internet and mobile users and also the ‘comfortability’ of the people making credit card payments on the Internet. There are of course other methods to collect payments – for example, through a telco or through active merchants like the way mig33 has implemented it.

Enjoy the infographic below.

Props go out to The Motley Fool blog for creating this very informative graphic about Apple’s recent activities in China.

To me, the most notable tidbit included here is the fact that China saw a six-fold increase in growth in the last 12 months. This is even more remarkable when you consider that iPhone in China costs about 21 percent of the GDP per capita. While I’m sure this would vary greatly if limited to urban areas only, I think it’s still pretty stunning.

You can be sure that China will be watching for the upcoming launch of the new iPhone 5 just as closely as the rest of the world.

About six months ago, LinkedIn reported it has over 100 million users across the globe. And out of these, 10 million are based in India. The number is poised to increase as LinkedIn starts placing more emphasis on Asia-Pacific markets, especially in India and Japan.

LinkedIn has already had offices in India since 2009. It recently set up an APAC head office in Singapore. Plus, a Japan office will be opened later this year.

Despite those moves into other nations in Asia, India still proves to be one of the core markets for the professional social networking site. The good folks at Eyedealab created an infographic to provide us a visual breakdown of LinkedIn in India. Here are three interesting facts that caught my attention:

• I’m the boss! — There are 400,000 Indian LinkedIn users who’re listed as business owners in their titles.
• A geeky country indeed — IT is one of the top industries listed in India
• ‘Ayurveda’ in job titles? Yes, 2,587 of them have that.

Catch the infographic below and let us know what catches your attention.

A heat-map of Jiepang check-ins across Greater China. This and all infographic images in this post are provided by Jiepang,com.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

One of Jiepang’s most popular location-based services (LBS), Jiepang, has made a neat infographic that breaks down some user trends. It gives a snapshot of how China’s smartphone-carryin’, LBS-lovin’ youngsters spend their time. It reveals a pretty keen engagement with brands by these users, and a good understanding of what’s hot right now.

Beijing Hot-Spots

Starting in Beijing, we see the hottest part of the city, in terms of check-ins, is the unassuming downtown area of Xizhimen. Not a place for tourists to bother with, it reveals that Jiepang’s users are utilizing the service to check-in to lots of regular restaurants, gyms, and offices – not just fancy malls or travel destinations.

Just last month, the company revealed that it was working with Nokia on a new series of NFC field trials in Beijing and five other Chinese cities. Those NFC check-in posters will come in handy in the city, where some areas see well over a thousand check-ins.

Brands and Movies

When Penn-Olson talked to Jiepang’s CEO this summer, he made it clear that engaging with brands was big news for the company, as well as with its users. Thus it’s no surprise that the service’s users have some distinct favourite brands: namely Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King, Doraemon (yes, the Japanese cartoon), and Earth Hour. That last one’s a bit of an oddity, but it shows that sometimes Jiepang’s fans make use of the service as a microblog to broadcast stances, and values.

Next, Jiepang’s infographic reveals which film caused the biggest buzz in China so far this year amongst its mostly younger users. And the winner was… Pirates of the Caribbean 4, narrowly beating out Kung-fu Panda 2 in terms of movie check-ins.

Eating Out

Lastly, turning to food, Jiepang’s multitude of daily check-ins reveal what people like to eat at certain times of day. Fast food is favoured fare around breakfast time, and then loses popularity during the day; deserts, meanwhile, hit a peak at about 4pm as lots of people venture out for some Chinese-style afternoon tea. Unsurprisingly, street BBQ check-ins multiply in volume as the night deepens, and people seek out pretty much the only hot food there is available.

Mad for Malls

One last detail worth noting is that Chinese consumers are mad for malls – but mainly mid-range ones with plenty of food options. The two most popular venues in Beijing and Shanghai are both such venues (Joy City Xidan, and Jinqiao Plaza, respectively). Beijing’s Sanlitun district – home to one of China’s official Apple stores – is that city’s second most checked-in site; Shanghai’s IKEA is that city’s third-placed venue. To check out the entire infographic, click here.

We’ve said much already about Facebook’s booming popularity in both Indonesia and India. But a fun infographic from the folks at Ogilvy attempts to put the growing numbers into new perspective. The graphic notes that Facebook has 179 million users in Asia, which — if it were a country — would make it the region’s fourth largest. Only China, India, and Indonesia have a higher population.

Ogilvy’s Facebook graphic actually comes in two portions, and the second serving below examines Facebook’s penetration of online and total populations in Asian countries. Note Singapore and Hong Kong each have over half of their entire populations on Facebook.

We’ve seen rise of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter globally. India is one of the most prominent countries on social networks, despite the fact that only 8.5 percent of the population has access to the Internet.

Facebook has 31 million Indian users making it the third largest country on Facebook after the USA and Indonesia. It has around 13 million Indian users on Twitter.

For more great information on how Facebook and Twitter are doing in India, check out this brilliant infographic from Techonzo below.

[Sources: Techonzo]

G+ (and no, we don’t mean Google+) has created a new infographic which predicts how the mobile payments industry might shape up in the near future. Mobile payments are growing, and fast too. It’s nothing new, since it has been part of Japanese mobile habits for quite some time. But widespread adoption is beginning to take off and it’s set to be a focal point for device manufacturers, software vendors, carriers, banks and retailers going forward.

So just how are things expected to look once it really gets going? G+’s infographic below predicts that mobile payments will exceed $670 billion by 2015, and 40 percent of it will be from the sales of digital goods. This trend is clear in Japan, where we have seen the giant mobile social network, DeNA, generate US$12.5 million per month with its Kaito Royal game. Across the globe, Asia, Europe & North, and America will constitute 75 percent of all transactions.

The infographic looks pretty slick, and numbers represent a great hope for the industry. Check it out and let us know what you think about it in comments below:

Via: Mashable

Update: We made changes to the flags — Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Facebook appears to be making some real progress in Asia. Back in February, we reported that there were 143 million Facebook users in the region. But now after five months, the figure has ballooned to 166 million, a 13.8 percent jump*.

As Facebook approaches the one billion mark, Asia’s growth will play a huge role in helping the platform reach that figure. With that in mind we thought it would be fun to break down the Asia userbase into it’s respective countries. You can see the results in the infographic below.

* Stats retrieved from SocialBakers.

What makes people want to follow a brand on Facebook and Twitter? The folks over at Columnfive and GetSatisfaction explored this question and presented the answers in a neat infographic.

Not surprisingly, the majority of the people who become fans of a brand on Facebook do so because of promotions and deals. Another large bulk of ‘likes’ comes from existing customers. Interestingly, only 18.2 percent become a fan of a page because of the actual content. It’s pretty much the same case on Twitter too.

While most of us say that content is king, it seems that deals have more of a pull factor to keep people engaged. Curious to learn more, I chatted on Skype with Preetham Venkky, a Facebook expert who also works closely with the Facebook team in India and Ireland, to seek his opinion:

“Offers and deals are always a motivating factor. It’s a digital adaptation of the ‘coupon’ culture. Even in Asia, most people ‘like’ pages because they think they might win something for free. But none of the leading pages actually offer deals such as ‘Here’s a 20%-off coupon for our fans here on Facebook.’ At least not in India.”

To support his point, Preetham showed me a couple of top Indian brands on the social network, including Tata Docomo, MTV India (which also is already on Google+), Fastrack, and Kingfisherworld. None of them offer exclusive deals for Facebook fans.

Preetham went on to explain that most Indian brands on Facebook used to run contests through their page wall to gain traction. That very action is against Facebook’s promotion guidelines (which state you can only run contests through applications and/or tabs) which also explains why we have witnessed so many brands in India experiencing sudden Facebook page shut-downs.

Preetham explained that to pull in fans on Facebook, brands will now have to do it under a tab or through an application. “Contests and promotions, if crafted sensibly, can be very engaging,” he said.

Besides such contests and promotions, content can still be a good source of engagement, but Preetham admits that it is difficult to create engaging content consistently for a long period of time unless you’re in the media business.

Personally, my take is that a brand should have a good mixture of both contests and content. A corporate blog is always good, but it is understandable that a business can’t churn out great content on a daily basis. At the same time, contests aren’t exactly relevant to every brand as well. So it is really all about finding the right mix for your brand, and displaying the strengths of your business on your Facebook or Twitter page.

We have an awesome graphic to share here on a lazy Sunday evening. Market research firm Global Web Index has designed a gorgeous infographic that visualizes how the world uses online social networking services, categorizing behavior types into four main groups:

• Active social networks users
• Messengers and mailers
• Content sharers
• Joiners and creators of groups

The behavioral data is based on detailed questions Global Web Index asked as part of its study into the ways that consumers use social networks across the globe.

In one glance, the map shows how various countries use social networks differently. From a macro view, countries in the West use social networks mostly for messengers and mailers. In contrast, in the East sharing content is the primary activity on social networks, except for Australia which pretty much follows the western behavior.

Overall social network activity in Asia is extremely robust, namely in Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. Each of these countries has more than 10 million active social networks users, scoring 50 percent in each of the listed activities. It is worth mentioning that Singapore, a country with only about five million has two million active social networks users. When we last checked, more than 40 percent of Singaporeans were on Facebook.

Is there anything else about the infographic that intrigues you? Let us know your thoughts.

More resources about social media in Asia:

• Thomas Crampton on Asia and Digital Marketing
• Indonesia: The Next Big Thing in Digital Media
• The Social Media Landscape in India [VIDEO]
• Social Media In Asia [INFOGRAPHIC]
• The Social Media Landscape in China [INFOGRAPHIC]

[Hat tip: Visual Loop]