Beijing may be China’s capital, but as we saw last month, it’s still not winning any races when it comes to internet speed. But the Beijing subsidiary of China Unicom may help to change that today, as it launches a new broadband connection scheme that ups speeds and makes 4 Mbp the slowest connection in the city. Given that Beijing’s average broadband speed right now is 3.5 Mbps, that’s pretty good.

So, if you have a Unicom broadband connection, here’s what’s changing for you, starting today:

• If you had a 512 kbps or 1 Mbps connection, then your connection speed is being raised to 4 Mbps.
• If you had a 2 Mbps connection, your connection speed is being raised to 10 Mbps.
• If you had a 4 or 8 Mbps connection, your speed is being raised to 20 Mbps.
• Fiber-optic customers may be able to get speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

In short, it’s good news all around, with everybody’s internet getting faster while prices stay the same (at least for now).

The move is in part a response to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s goal of having 75 percent of Chinese broadband users on 4 Mbps or higher connections this year (up from its 50 percent goal for 2012). Given that seems likely that Unicom may roll out similar plans in other cities across China, so even if you don’t live in Beijing, you can hold out some hope that someday soon, your internet speed will get kicked up a notch too.

(Tencent Tech via Techweb)

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released the latest official numbers for broadband penetration in the country. According to the Ministry, China now has more than 180 million broadband subscribers, and that number continues to grow.

While the growth of broadband internet is impressive, it’s worth pointing out that in some respects, China has actually skipped broadband and moved straight on to mobile. The country already has more than 1.1 billion mobile subscribers, and well over 200 million of them are already on 3G. In fact, the country broke 200 million 3G subscribers last October and by the latest counts, has probably already cracked 250 million. And with the number of smartphone users also climbing steadily and already over 300 million by some counts, it’s clearly the mobile market that’s going to be making the biggest waves for the immediate future.

(image source)

Of course, at just an average of 4.7 Mbps, even Shanghai’s internet isn’t very fast. Still, it dwarfs the average connection speed in last-place-finisher Inner Mongolia, which clocks in at just 2.3 Mbps.

(Qihoo via China Daily)

Perhaps even more significant, though, is that CNNIC says 242 million Chinese users bought things over the web last year. That’s a big number, but in a country with more than 1.3 billion people, it also belies just how much room there is for the Chinese e-commerce market to grow over the long term — especially if China’s economy keeps growing along with it.

The most common purchases online — by far — were clothing items (including shoes and hats), with 81.8 percent of e-commerce users having bought at least one clothing item online every six months. Next was daily necessities, which 31.6 percent of users bought. Third in line was computers and other digital electronics, which 29.6 percent of users purchased.

40.7 percent of e-commerce users in China used a mobile device to browse e-commerce sites at least once in the past half year, and of those users, 53.6 percent used a mobile app connected to the e-commerce platform they were browsing (as opposed to the phone’s web browser). Unsurprisingly, that’s a significant increase from last year. And if Alibaba’s numbers are any indication, next year is likely to be even bigger.

(CNNIC via Sina Tech, image source)

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)

Recently, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released a lengthy and very detailed report on the world of Chinese mobile games. We hope to dig more into the report for future goodies, but the first thing we wanted to share with all you aspiring China game developers out there was a breakdown of exactly who is playing what, by age, by education level, and by location. In its data, CNNIC also helpfully separated the players of online mobile games (i.e. web and HTML5 games that can be played in a browser or that require an internet connection for game functions) from players of regular mobile games (i.e., apps that you download and that run entirely on your phone without needing an internet connection).

Let’s take a look first at the breakdown by age. Note that the percentages here refer to the percent of the total number of gamers who play that kind of game. So, for example, the first column in the graph below tells you that of all the gamers who play regular mobile games, 20.6 percent are under 20 years old.

Now, let’s take a look at the breakdown by education level. It’s interesting to note that apparently the more educated someone is, the more they seem to prefer regular mobile games over online mobile games.

And finally, let’s take a look at what people are playing in the cities versus in the countryside. There shouldn’t be much surprise here; lots more urban people are playing games, and there’s not a big split between online and offline games here.

(Chinese Mobile Gaming User Investigation Report [Chinese only], 2012 CNNIC)

If there’s one thing kids love, it’s video games. Unfortunately, lots of really fun video games aren’t particularly appropriate for kids, or so says a new report on China’s gaming industry released by the China Youth Internet Association and China Youth Net. The report sums up research conducted over the course of 2012 that looked at 423 games from major Chinese game publishers like Shanda, Tencent, Kingsoft, and Netease. It concludes that China doesn’t have enough games suitable for minors.

In total, the report found that 78.5 percent of the games researchers looked at weren’t suitable for minors, and less than 2 percent were suitable for kids six to twelve. Of course, what’s suitable for minors is subjective; this report classified games with violence, crime, simulated gambling situations, or player-killing to be unsuitable for kids (among other things).

China has long been troubled by how to handle its child gamers; just last month I wrote about how child gamers need a safe place to play games that can keep them out of sketchy internet cafes. Gaming addiction can be a serious problem, but it seems a more fundamental one might be that there aren’t enough games out there suitable for kids to play in the first place. And as the report points out, this appears to be a China-specific problem. Of the many Western games rated by the ESRB, only 9 percent aren’t suitable for minors, and 67 percent were suitable for anyone over age ten. That could be the result of differing standards — I get the impression that the Chinese games were judged a little more harshly — but it also points to a lack of kids games in China’s web games market.

That’s a social problem, but it’s also a potential opportunity for mobile and web game developers looking at the China market. China’s kid gaming population may not be as big a market as the market for adult games, but it’s also not as crowded, and many parents may be actively looking for games that aren’t full of sex, violence, and gambling for their kids to play.

(China Youth Internet Association Report via QQ Games, image source)

Many of China’s tech luminaries are gathered in Beijing for the Two Meetings, and that means they’re all talking to the press. Xu Long, a National People’s Congress rep and the CEO of China Mobile’s Guangzhou subsidiary, took to the airwaves himself yesterday and made a grim pronouncement for China’s mobile market: only 13.7 percent of Chinese mobile app developers are actually making a profit.

It’s not entirely clear where that number comes from, but Xu says the source is “an investigation” of the country’s million-plus mobile app developers. Xu says the low number of profitable developers is evidence that China needs to continue exploring healthy and sustainable models for developing the mobile market.

Despite that rather depressing number, Xu says he’s still quite optimistic about the future of the mobile marketplace in China. And, like the tech CEOs we talked about yesterday, he’s got proposals for how China can improve the marketplace, which center mostly on bolstering China’s broadband and wireless infrastructure as well as giving greater support to tech companies working in mobile.

(via Sina Tech)

It also seems like a pretty optimistic proposal for a nation that doesn’t even have a 4G network right now. But China Mobile has been waiting for years to roll out its TD-LTE network and has test stations in many major cities already. There are signs that Chinese authorities may permit the operation of a commercial TD-LTE network before the end of this year. If that happens — and it’s still definitely an if — that would give China Mobile’s network two full years to grow into that 60 million number.

But could the network grow fast enough? Assuming the network is launched late this year or early in 2014, China Mobile would need to average around 2.5 million new subscribers each month to hit the 60 million mark within two years. If we look at the company’s 3G growth numbers, that certainly seems possible; the company added more than seven million users this past January alone.

Ultimately, though, whether or not 4G catches on will likely depend as much on the pricing as anything else. China Mobile’s 4G plan in Hong Kong costs between HK$48 and HK$188 ($6-$24) per month, which is pretty affordable, but the plans for mainland China are likely to be priced differently, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Specifically, Kantar says Apple hit 23.2 percent of China’s smartphone market in January, up from 18.6 percent in September 2012. But Android saw even more impressive growth, jumping from 65.2 percent of the market in September to 71.5 percent of it in January. The big losers, unsurprisingly, were everyone else. Symbian and Windows Phone both dropped (to 3.5 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively) and other OSes didn’t even register. Here’s a chart of what the market looks like now, according to Kantar:

And here’s a chart that compares the size of each company’s market share in China between September 2012 and January 2013:

Kantar’s report also says that smartphone penetration in China has reached 22 percent, so there is still an awful lot of room for position-shifting as the other four-fifths of the country begin the shift to smartphones.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

And over-reliance isn’t just damaging to one’s social life, either: 57.1 percent said it was hurting eyesight, 52.3 percent felt it was bad for overall health, and 35.7 percent said it was giving people attention deficit problems.

It’s no wonder, really: on the same survey 57.1 percent of the respondents said that they used their phones for more than an hour each day, not counting time spent on actual phone calls or texting. And nearly 20 percent of those said they used their phones for more than three hours a day not counting calling and texting.

The survey also found other signs of addiction: 36.8 percent said they had experienced “phantom phone rings,” 36.4 percent said they were never without their phones, 30.2 percent admitted to aimlessly looking at their phones for no reason, and 24 percent said they’d heard warnings like “Stop playing with your phone!” before.

So what are all these people doing on their phones? Here’s an interactive chart we made of the China Youth Daily‘s results:

The survey was conducted across several different websites, and as such, its respondents almost certainly skewed towards being younger, urban, and wealthier than the average Chinese person. And of course, as with any web poll, there are other issues from selection bias to technology glitches to keep in mind. With that said though, at 12,098 respondents, the results of the survey shouldn’t be taken too lightly.

It’s easy to dismiss the results of this survey as people being overly worried, but scientific studies have shown that the mere presence of a mobile phone can negatively impact social relationships, and mobile usage has been shown to have all kinds of effects on behavior, including increasing selfishness. Anecdotally, most of us have probably used our phones as a way to get out of an awkward conversation or make it look like we’re busy to avoid talking to someone. We may not think of those mobile-inspired behaviors as significant, but it seems that they are, especially over the long term.

It is darkly ironic that our increasingly local-, social-focused mobile phones are actually making us less social and less aware of what’s going on around us. But that’s apparently true, and if the China Youth Daily‘s survey is any indication, Chinese users are already well aware of it.

It will be interesting to see if in the long-term, mobile phone and especially smartphone use changes Chinese business culture, which is very focused on connections and personal relationships. If that seems like a stretch, it isn’t necessarily. Mobile phones have already had a huge impact on Chinese culture, and fundamentally changed one of its oldest traditions: spring festival greetings.

Traditionally, in the days after spring festival, people would visit their friends and relatives to wish them well face-to-face. But as mobile phones became commonplace across the country, people began sending their greetings as text messages instead. While people still often visit their close relatives in person, other acquaintances now get only a text message rather than a face-to-face visit. Whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing probably depends on how much you like seeing your distant relatives in person — for some, the advent of texted spring festival greetings was probably a godsend. But mobile phones definitely have the power to reshape even our most deeply-rooted cultural traditions and behaviors, and as smartphones get more pervasive, the changes are likely to get more dramatic.

(China Youth Daily via TechWeb)

China Mobile reports that it gained 7.05 million new 3G subscribers in January, pushing its total 3G user count to nearly 95 million. China Unicom picked up 3.67 million new 3G subscribers, bringing its total 3G users above 80 million. China Telecom just barely broke the 3 million mark with its new 3G users, which puts its latest 3G user count at just above 72 million.

That’s a lot of numbers, so here’s a chart with the telecoms’ total mobile subscriber numbers included for scale (yellow).

So, while China’s 3G industry is growing fast (keep in mind the red bar in the graph above represents just one month of growth), there’s still a long way to go. China still has fewer than 250 million 3G users, out of a total of well over one billion mobile subscribers.

(Source: Sina Tech, Sina Tech, and Sina Tech; image via China Daily)

We already saw that Sina Weibo had a bang-up morning this past holiday weekend, with over 34,000 posts in a single second commemorating the new Year of the Snake. But in recent years, Chinese people sent most of their new year’s greetings via text message, and this year has been no exception. According to estimates from China’s three major telecoms, Chinese people sent a whopping 1.16 billion new year’s greetings texts this holiday. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

While the total number of texts is up slightly from last year’s 1.1. billion, the per-capita new year’s text rate has actually dropped because China has picked up millions of new mobile users over the past year. In Beijing, for example, people sent an average of 36 texts this holiday, down from 42 last year. The culprit? Newer media like Weibo and WeChat. WeChat was especially popular this year because it allows for the sending of voice greetings, which feels more intimate and personal than a simple text message.

Obviously texting isn’t about to die out, but we have already looked at how Chinese people aren’t sending as many texts as they used to, and as apps like WeChat become more popular that trend is likely to accelerate.

(Beijing Morning Post via Sina Tech, image source)

Everyone knows that mobile is the future. In fact, forget the future, mobile is a big part of the present. And while Chinese internet giants continue to enter and push on the mobile browser front, the latest numbers from iResearch show that UCWeb continues to hold a commanding lead among third-party mobile browsers. Just check out this chart from iResearch’s report about who was using which browsers in December, 2012 (the numbers add up to more than 100 percent because some people use more than one mobile browser):

Perhaps more telling, iResearch’s numbers also show that UCWeb’s mobile browser is still experiencing strong growth. Its closest competitor, the QQ mobile browser, is growing too, but as is clear from the chart above, it has a lot of ground to cover before it catches up to UCWeb. No wonder UCWeb is looking seriously at an IPO in 2013!

It’s also interesting to note how low many of the other international mobile browsers are on the totem pole. Opera has a pretty respectable 8 percent but beyond that, the other offerings barely even register. That Chinese users have a preference for Chinese-designed things is no surprise, but it’s still interesting to see popular international browsers like Dolphin so low on the totem pole.

(Data via iResearch China Mobile Market Report 2012)

According to MIIT, the sale of mobiles and other electronics manufactured in China brought in more than 8.5 trillion RMB ($1.3 trillion) for the domestic electronics manufacturing industry. And in addition to all those mobile phones, China also produced 350 million computers, 130 million TVs, and more than 82 billion integrated circuits.

Although the manufacturing of other products like textiles may be slowly moving to Southeast Asia, it’s clear that when it comes to making electronics, the world is still looking to China. All of the 2012 numbers represent growth of at least 4 percent compared to 2011 (computers and circuits grew much faster), and I’d hazard to guess that in 2013 all of those numbers will be higher still.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

Of course given China’s growth trends, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise, and it’s not clear exactly when China first inched above the worldwide average (probably sometime in late 2012). And of course, 3G is growing in China too (though it’s nowhere near 82 percent proliferation yet). In fact, even the internet is going mobile.

And if MIIT’s statistics are any indication, China’s mobile growth isn’t likely to slow any time soon, as six of the country’s provinces actually average more mobile phones than there are people. Beijing averaged a whopping 157.2 mobile phones per hundred people, and Shanghai wasn’t too far behind with 128 phones per hundred people. Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, and (surprisingly) Inner Mongolia also averaged more than 100 phones per 100 people. (This is possible because some people have more than one phone; for example work and home mobiles, or different mobiles so they can access different telecom carriers).

Inner Mongolia’s presence on that list (even though at 102 mobiles per 100 people it barely made it) is a sign that China’s less-developed Western provinces are also getting in on the mobile madness. With so many total mobile users, growth rates will have to slow down, but I still wouldn’t be surprised to learn that within a year or two, China actually has more mobile phones than it has people.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

So why are Chinese people sending fewer texts? The short answer is WeChat. Tencent’s WeChat and other multimedia messaging apps have taken Chinese mobile phones by storm, and quite frankly, they’re just more fun than regular texting. For example, when my wife and I got Xiaomi phones, we started using Xiaomi’s MMS app Miliao because it allowed us to send each other dumb scribbles, audio messages, and even hand-written text easily. And when her friends started switching to WeChat, my wife (previously a big texter) did too.

Some 420 million Chinese have phones that can access the internet and thus make use of services like WeChat, and that is almost certainly what is responsible for the drop in text messages. Since the number of Chinese adopting smartphones and making use of apps like WeChat continues to climb rapidly, it’s likely that test messaging numbers will continue to drop over the course of 2013, perhaps even more sharply than they did in 2012. The text message is dying, and WeChat killing it. I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

2012 is over, and it was quite an interesting year for startups. Chinese-language startup database 17startup.com has put together quite a lengthy report on the year in startups based on its very sizable database. We’ll be combing through the report for more interesting details over the next few days, but let’s start off with some big picture trends.

First, and most importantly, what kind of startups were Chinese entrepreneurs founding in 2012? The answer, overwhelmingly, was mobile and e-commerce startups. Here’s a translated graph from 17Startup’s report; as you can see, mobile and e-commerce amount for more than 50 percent of the new startups founded last year. Social is a large player too, although its numbers are down from previous years; games and web tools were the other big winners. Since the graph can be a little tough to read, note that I’ve listed all the percentages along the right side of the image in next to all the category types.

But while those guys were checking into China’s startup scene, who was checking out? 17Startup also has a breakdown of the year in failed startups. So what kinds of startups bit the bucket in 2012? Unsurprisingly since most startups fail, e-commerce and mobile are still at the top of the list. Social startups also took a big hit, and comparing this with the breakdown of new startups above, it’s quite obvious that social as a trend is on its way out in the Chinese startup scene.

We’ll likely have more over the next few days as we dig further into the 17startup report.

As you can see, the company picked up just 3.8 million new users in November. That sounds impressive, but it’s China Mobile’s worst monthly performance since 2005. Of course, it’s still not bad by any stretch of the imagination — it’s actually still higher than China Unicom’s total new users in November — but it isn’t the kind of strong growth the company has been used to, and its new 3G user signups are still a little behind Unicom.

So, while November wasn’t a disaster for China Mobile, the company is probably hoping very much that it isn’t a trend, either. New user signups have already been nearly halved since this year’s high (5.96 million new users in February), and if they drop much lower, there really will be a big gap between China Mobile and its more 3G-friendly competitors.

[via Sina Tech]

Oh yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: the time when everyone starts releasing end of year lists. And while most of them are about as compelling as lukewarm microwaved pizza, it’s always interesting to see what’s going on on Sina Weibo, arguably China’s hottest and craziest social network. Sina has released the full lists and you can read all about them here, but here are some of the highlights:

The year’s hottest topic? The London Olympics, which was mentioned nearly 400 million times on the service. Other hot topics include popular memes from the year like a slang term for “loser” and the “aircraft carrier style” meme, the Diaoyu/Senkaku island dispute (mentioned 42 million times), the 18th Party Congress (17.8 million times), Beijing’s deadly summer rainstorm (which your humble correspondent very nearly ventured out into, because he is an idiot), and more.

Sina also released a list of the hottest weibo accounts, but there’s not much interesting there in my opinion — as you might expect, many of the accounts listed are joke/novelty accounts. But it also released a list of the most-discussed celebrities on Weibo, which is more interesting. Topping the list is — who else — Korean pop star PSY, but tech star Kaifu Lee also made the list at number six, with more than 37 million mentions. Blogger Han Han also made the list, with 46 million mentions. And what list of popular people on the Chinese internet would be complete without Japanese porn star Sola Aoi, with 19.2 million mentions?

Anyway, the full lists are here, and I expect we’ll hear more from Sina over the next few weeks about how the year went for Weibo. Incidentally, if you’re interested in what people were talking about on Sina Weibo in China this year, this is a great alternative list with some things on it that Sina probably wouldn’t want to advertise people were talking about.

[via Sina Tech]

In terms of the total number of Chinese netizens, that will rise to an anticipated 570 million by the end of this year, assuming average growth per half-year of five percent:

Here’s the historical growth going all the way back to the summer of 2008 when there were a mere 70 million mobile internet users in China:

As we noted recently, Asia is pushing forward this new era in web accessibility, seeing 192.5 percent growth in mobile internet traffic since 2012. At the heart of that are affordable smartphones – especially Android-powered ones. This year, Canalys notes, China accounted for 27 percent of the 158 million global smartphone shipments.

[Source: CNNIC data; via ChinaInternetWatch]

With 4G still showing no signs of becoming commercially available anytime soon in China, 3G continues its rapid growth. Case in point: China Unicom added another 3.2 million 3G subscribers in October, brining its total 3G number up to more than 70 million. Readers may recall that Unicom picked up 3 million new subscribers back in August, too, indicating that this pace is apparently sustainable. (That’s good, because Unicom has quite a ways to go before it catches up with China Mobile).

China Unicom’s broadband business is growing, too. In October, the company added 677,000 new broadband accounts, brining its total up to more than 63 million.

Mobile 2G growth, unsurprisingly, is much slower. Unicom added just 190,000 new 2G accounts in October, and that number is down by more than a hundred thousand compared to August, which indicates the company’s already-slow 2G growth is slowing even further.

Of course, Unicom also offers wired phone services, but interest in that is clearly waning. The company lost 25,000 wired phone subscribers in October.

[Via Sina Tech, Image Source]

Some popular domestic-brand phones.

Over the past couple of years, Chinese companies have been cranking out smartphones like clockwork while global brands like Nokia and LG have busied themselves with losing market share left and right. The result, according to research firm Canalys, is that as of Q3 2012, domestic brands account for 60 percent of China’s smartphone market.

The top five smartphone brands are Samsung, Lenovo, CoolPad, Huawei, and ZTE according to the research firm. Samsung is a Korean company, of course, but the other companies are all domestic brands.

Whether this trend will continue is anyone’s guess. Lenovo’s recent performance would seem to be an indication of growing Chinese dominance, as its mobile division has been kicking ass recently. ZTE, on the other hand, is bleeding staffers and money, and cutbacks to the mobile department (or straight-up bankruptcy) could lie in the company’s future.

[via Sina Tech]

If you’re wondering just how big a jump that is, China broken the 100 million subscriber barrier in September of 2011, meaning that China has picked up 100 million new 3G subscribers in the past year. 3G networks first became commericially available in 2009, so the second hundred million users came much more quickly than the first.

And with no signs that 4G will be allowed into the commercial market soon — China’s regulators seem to want to let the 3G market develop further before allowing it to be cannibalized by 4G — 3G user growth is unlikely to slow any time soon. And given that China has more than a billion mobile users, there’s still a ton of room left for growth.

[China News Service via Sina Tech, Image via Shutterstock]

According to a report released yesterday by China’s Social Sciences Academic Press, China’s internet users are expected to exceed 800 million by 2015. China already has more than a half-billion net users, and with smartphone and broadband penetration growing rapidly, SSAP’s prediction may be optimistic but it certainly isn’t unrealistic.

SSAP’s report says that more than a quarter of the internet users to be gained over the next few years will come from China’s countryside, where broadband and smartphone penetration rates are markedly lower than in cities.

The report’s predictions are based on official government numbers that put China’s net users at 538 million as of June of this year. Sustained growth is predicted because the costs of accessing the internet are going down (especially as cheap smartphones flood the market) and because China has more than 1.3 billion people, so the potential market for the internet is vast.

And what are these Chinese users doing online? A little over a month ago we took a look at a CNNIC report that broke down Chinese internet user habits — and how they’re changing — into a pretty detailed table. Here’s the scoop:

The SSAP report also says that China has more microbloggers than any other nation on earth, with 274 million total microbloggers as of the end of June. While impressive, that number is a bit of an embarassment for Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, both of which claim to have more than 300 million total users on their services alone. Clearly there are a lot of duplicate accounts and zombies.

[via Sina Tech, image via Shutterstock]

But first things first. How are things changing? The following chart, which like all the others on this page was constructed by Tech in Asia using the CNNIC data, gives a breakdown of the overall percent of net users who used only mobiles or only PCs to access the web in China over the past couple years. As you can see, the number of PC-only users is declining, and the number of mobile-only users is on its way up.

But who are these mobile-only users anyway? CNNIC’s data breaks down education demographics, offering the overall percentage of each demographic group that accesses the web via mobile-only. As you can see, the higher the user’s education level, the less likely they are to use only mobile devices to access the web. That makes a lot of economic sense — children and less educated adults are less likely to be able to afford pricey desktops and laptops.

CNNIC also looked at the data by industry, again breaking down the percentage of mobile-only users in each demographic group. Unsurprisingly, farmers and migrant workers are near the top, with nearly half of migrant workers who use the web accessing it only from their mobile devices. Comparatively few workers in white-collar industries like tech and government use only mobiles to access the web.

So where’s the problem? As China gets more mobile, there’s going to be increasing interest in monetizing these mobile-only internet users. The problem is, they tend to do less of just about everything than PC-only users do. The shopping numbers below are particularly grim for aspiring mobile e-commerce operations: just over 6% of mobile-only users use their devices to shop. Yikes.

Now, granted, these habits are likely as much a reflection of the mobile-only demographics as they are a reflection of users changing habits as they increasingly browse the web via mobile devices rather than PCs. But with more and more users going mobile-only, even a small shift in habits could have huge repercussions for internet industries. If I were someone working in e-commerce or web video especially, I would be a little uncomfortable looking at these numbers.

Mobile is the future. Will PC-only users bring their PC habits to their mobile browsing when they make the switch? Or do mobile-only users’ habits indicate a larger trend of differing browsing habits on mobile devices that could spell trouble for some of China’s internet companies?

[CNNIC Report, image via Shutterstock]

As China continues its relentless march towards total connection and the inevitable borg assimilation that will follow, it’s good to check in every now and then to see where things are. Thanks to some new stats from the our friends at MIIT, we’ve got the latest word on where China is now.

MIIT reports that as of the end of August, there were 1.07 billion mobile phone users in China, and 192 million of them (about 18 percent) are 3G users. But, as we’ve heard from lots of sources, those numbers are growing fast. MIIT says that in total, China has gained more than 64 million 3G subscribers so far this year.

Needless to say that growth has been good to everybody’s bottom lines; MIIT says that the industry has taken in more than 706 billion RMB ($112 billion) in revenue, which is up 9 percent compared to the first eight months of last year. Amazingly, although mobile phones make up for more than 70 percent of telecom revenue at this point, MIIT says that revenue from fixed line telephones grew a little bit even as those services lost a little ground in terms of their percentage of overall telecom revenue.

The lesson here: phones in China simply cannot be stopped. Apparently even fixed-line phones. (Oh, and if you don’t get the image here, you need to watch this).

[Telecom World via Sina Tech]

Unicom also picked up some new 2G users in August, but with just 336,000 new accounts, it’s clear that new 3G subscribers are growing much faster than new 2G subscribers. 3G still has a long way to go, though; China Unicom has more than 162 million 2G-only subscribers. This number is part of the reason China’s government is delaying the release of a 4G network; it wants to see 3G networks more widely adopted first.

Unicom also offers internet service; and unsurprisingly dial-up connections dropped in August by 167,000 accounts, while broadband accounts jumped 647,000. Here too, though, there is still a ways to go. In total Unicom still has more than 92 million dial-up users and just 62 million broadband users.

[Via Sina Tech, Image Source]

But of course, the business sharks out there are probably more curious about which browsers are winning the mobile browser wars. The short answer is that Tencent products are looking good — no surprise there — and UC Web is out in front, but a lot of people still just use whatever comes on their phone. Here are the details in sexy bar graph format:

The fact that “default” still holds such a significant position is probably a testament to how much of this market is still up for grabs — and how valuable it can be to get your app installed by default on handsets in China. It may be hard for anyone to unseat UCWeb (who’ve got the cool, “indie” factor) or Tencent (who’ve got the we-make-every-web-service-you-use factor) at this point, but which one of them comes out on top in the end could depend in part on who can take a bit out of that 47 percent of the market that’s currently held by default browsers.

The restive province is known as one of China’s less developed areas, and indeed, the 2 million user number belies Xinjiang’s below-average broadband penetration rate. With around 158 million broadband users, China’s broadband penetration rate is nearly 12 percent, while Xinjiang’s is just above 9 percent.

Of course, Xinjiang’s internet took a hit in 2009 when, following a series of violent ethnic riots, the government shut off all internet and telecommunications services in the region. For a significant period afterwards, Xinjiang users could access only an “intranet” of sorts that gave them access to a few provincial portal sites and services, but not much else. This almost certainly stymied the speed of broadband growth in Xinjiang, though the province certainly seems to be on the road to recovery at this point.

In fact, Xinjiang is ninth on China’s overall internet use list (remember that not everyone uses broadband to connect) with a penetration rate of forty percent. That also makes it the most internet-friendly province in China’s western region.

[Via Sina Tech]

According to IDC analysts, this jump is due in large part to the bump in China’s cheap smartphone market, which has exploded over the past year. This trend will help push smartphone growth domestically, as will the rollout of 4G wireless networks in China, whenever that happens.

IDC analysts also said they expected smartphone growth to accelerate in second- and third-tier cities even as it begins to decelerate in cities like Beijing and Shanghai where smartphones already have a high penetration rate.

Of course, none of this should be particularly surprising to anyone who has been following the growth in China’s smartphone market at every level from apps to handsets.

The report also points out that India, with its huge population and low smartphone penetration rate, is potentially a huge market for growth, especially for companies that can produce low-cost handsets.

[IDC via Sina Tech, Image Source]

The report also says that the group buy industry did 14.6 billion RMB ($2.3 billion) in business over the first half of this year; that’s up 126 percent over the first half last year. But most of that money is going to the top players; other sites are dying off. In fact, the industry as a whole hit a death rate of more than 48 percent, according to the report. Yup, that means that in the past six months, basically half of China’s group buy industry died. (Hey, we told you that winter was coming a year ago, people. Apparently Chinese group buy startup CEOs don’t pay enough attention to our blog.)

The report also says that surviving group buy sites seem to be shifting away from foods and services to offering deals on luxury items, where profits are higher.

What’s a little amazing is that people are still founding new group buy sites in China. For example, the report says that two new group buy companies were created in the last ten days of June, and in the second quarter of the year more than 50 previously-defunct group buy sites were resurrected (although that number is less than half what it was in Q1, so this may not be good news).

Let’s just be frank about this, people: stop starting new group buy companies in China. At more than 48 percent failure, your chances of success in the group buy industry are only slightly better than your chances of survival would have been if you had bought a ticket for the Lusitania on the trip during which it sunk or had been living in Hiroshima in 1945. So stop doing it! Your chances of success have got to be better with some other kind of of company!

[via Sina Tech, Image Source]

These graphs from Hitwise show only data from PC/web clients (as opposed to mobile):

As the folks at TheNextWeb have pointed out, Sina’s dominance wasn’t just limited to the Chinese-language microblogosphere (I immediately regret using that word). Weibo users sent more than twice as many tweets as Twitter users during the games. It’s too bad there’s no gold medal for most active microblog, or China could have brought home yet another gold.

[via Sina Tech]

Of course, it’s no surprise to hear that analysts expect China’s casual web games market to continue its rapid expansion, but a word of caution to startups thinking about diving into this market: be aware that it’s extremely fractured. The low barrier of entry compared to traditional games means that lots of people have gotten into casual gaming, and even in a growth market, the truth about startups is always the same: most of them will ultimately fail.

If you are looking at this market, though, pay attention to the demographic expansion. As China’s web user numbers grow, new demographics are getting online, and some of them may be looking for a gaming experience that’s targeted more directly at them. Is there an opening for niche-casual games in China’s web gaming market? I’m no expert, but I’d say it’s an area that’s definitely worth looking at for anyone considering a potential gaming startup.

[Image source]

Group buy sites over the past year

What goes up must come down, and China’s group buy sector has been busy learning that the hard way for the past nine months. According to the latest data from group buy site tracker Tuan 800, China’s group buy sites are down 2,082 since last September, the high point in group buy fever, when the total number of sites was more than 5,000. That’s a more than 40 percent drop.

At the same time — and certainly not unrelated — consumer interest in the group buy model has also dropped. Income from transactions for the sites that still exist has dropped more than 50 percent compared to the first half of last year. The number of transactions has also dropped more than sixty percent. So group buy sites today, on average, are making less money from fewer transactions than they were last year. No wonder more than 2,000 sites are gone.

How many group buy sites will be left a year from now? The trend does not look good. Like many other sectors of China’s internet, the market seems to be consolidating, and the end result is going to leave an awful lot of people out in the cold.

(Readers will be pleased to know, though, that TuanBao is somehow still operating despite or perhaps because of its shift to an all-free model earlier this year and its CEO’s rather bizarre antics.)

[via TechWeb]

MIIT rep Zhang Xinsheng also revealed specifics; as of late June, China had more than 538 million total internet users, and 388 million total mobile internet users. And in case you’re wondering just how far China has come, Zhang pointed out that China’s internet users have increased 867 times compared to the number of net users the country boasted 15 years ago.

Also interesting: according to Zhang, migrant workers are starting to become netizens too thanks to internet-ready phones; more than 1.4 million migrant workers have accessed the internet via their mobiles. Rural netizens are also on the rise, with rural internet users totaling 146 million, or 27 percent of China’s total internet user base.

Zhang also said that mobile messaging apps are growing with impressive speed; that’s news that shouldn’t surprise any of our readers who have been following the expansion of mobile apps like Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat.

[via Sina Tech, Image source]

Sino’s Q1 report shows that at that time, Lenovo controlled 8.8 percent of China’s total mobile market, which put it in a tie for third place with Huawei. But just three months later, this new data is showing that Lenovo has rocketed past Huawei and Nokia to take second place with 11 percent of the overall market. Samsung remains the leader. We’ve taken the liberty of putting the new Sino data into an interactive chart and comparing it with the Q1 report so you can see what’s changed:

As evidenced by the chart above, Lenovo’s ascendance came along with big drops in market share from both Nokia and Samsung. Nokia’s downward spiral shouldn’t surprise anyone, and Samsung’s also makes sense given that its highly-priced smartphones are facing increasing competition in China from inexpensive domestic competitors.

Of course, Lenovo has to deal with those competitors, too, and there may be more details or mitigating factors that we’re not aware of because Sino Market Research hasn’t released the full report on its website yet. If you take the numbers at face value, though, it looks like Lenovo had a pretty impressive quarter.

The total sales figure is not new, and does fall in line with projections Tmall made at the beginning of the year. But the confirmation of this number at the halfway point in the year indicates that Tmall is likely well on its way to reaching that goal, and is probably already nearing or even beyond 100 billion RMB in sales. The company also announced some other details like these: this year, Tmall expects to sell 500 million RMB ($79 million) in 3C products and 600 million RMB ($95 million) in clothing. In total, Tmall is experiencing year-on-year growth of more than 100 percent, and an operating profit margin of more than 50 percent.

Tmall’s massive growth and success points to many things, but one interesting aspect of it is that because it sells branded items directly from the brands involved, its success may be seen as an indication that China’s middle class is increasingly unwilling to deal with knockoffs and unprofessional vendors on other e-commerce sites (including Alibaba’s own Taobao). That’s great news for brands looking to connect with China’s growing consumer base.

[via Sina Tech]

There are a few things worth pointing out. First, Google has a surprisingly impressive percentage of the search market for a company that doesn’t actually operate a search feature domestically. Given that its google.com.hk site works only intermittently here, it’s interesting that Google is able to retain its number two spot (even if it is a very distant number two). It’s also worth noting the utter absence of Bing, which does have a China version that’s apparently so unpopular it doesn’t even rate high enough to escape the tiny “Others” category. Ouch.

Enfodesk’s report also reveals that — surprise — the search market is growing rather rapidly; 62 percent compared to last year’s Q2 and 26 percent since Q1 2012. The market overall is now worth more than 7 billion RMB ($1.1 billion), and Baidu is taking a hefty $873 million chunk of that. Not too shabby.

However, it’s worth taking these numbers with a grain of salt as they look very different from the traffic numbers we saw from CNZZ earlier this year. Percent of traffic and percent of the search market (based on revenue) are two different things, of course, but it’s worth considering.

[EnfoDesk via Sina Tech]

Shanghai isn't this pixellated in real life.

If you’re planning a gaming startup in China, you could hardly choose a better location than Shanghai. At the opening of the CCG Expo in Shanghai this morning, Shanghai representatives announced that the city’s gaming industry’s value grew to 14.9 billion RMB (about $2.3 billion) in 2011. That’s a 24 percent jump over 2010, and that’s not all. At $2.3 billion, Shanghai now accounts for about 30 percent of the value of China’s games industry.

It also looks like there’s plenty of room to grow, especially in the mobile space. Web games accounted for 97 percent of the Shanghai industry’s value, with mobile games just a paltry three percent. However, mobile gaming is growing so quickly throughout China that I can’t help but imagine that number is going to balloon over this next year.

Shanghai already has 227 gaming companies — 215 of them private enterprises — but with fast growth and an apparent opening in the mobile gaming sector, it looks like a great spot for anyone looking for a location to found a mobile gaming startup.

"Oh, you silly cat. That's not how you spell 'cheeseburger'!"

Asia now has more than one billion internet users – or 1.016 billion, to be precise – who amount to 46 percent of the world’s total number of web users. More than half of those are in China. In addition, 623 million access the web via mobile phones. That’s the overview of the Asia-Pacific web scene depicted in a new report by the Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA), a non-profit organisation backed by corporate donors such as Google, Microsoft, and CNN.

For that fast-growing regional audience, ADMA cautions brands to think carefully before engaging in social marketing – “Although 60 percent of social networkers say that social networks are a good place to learn about brands, 50 percent also say they don’t want to be bothered by brands” – and to take care to note the “fragmentation of online activities” between different nations. Here are five eye-watering biz and marketing stats from ADMA’s David Ketchum:

• Online advertising spend in Asia-Pacific reached US$24.8 billion in 2011, making the region second only to the US, with $34.5 billion.
• Every marketing dollar spent online returns $1.78, exceeding the returns of all other marketing media including TV, print, out of home and trade (according to Nielsen).
• By 2015, Asia Pacific is expected to account for a third of all global mobile ad spend, reaching $6.92 billion.
• India, China, Australia and Japan are expected to generate $258 billion in commerce sales in 2012 between them, and mobile commerce is on the rise with 34 percent of mobile internet users in China and Korea transacting via handheld devices.
• Mobile app downloads reached five billion in 2011, generating $871 million.

Here are some of the key demographic tables from desktop internet users in Asia as a whole. It focuses on who’s online, Asia’s most trafficked sites (note Chinese web giants Tencent and Baidu), and where folks go for social media, online gaming, and e-commerce:

And here are three of the demographical highlights of mobile web users in Asia in the ADMA report. It’s interesting to note just how much more likely Asian mobile users are to do serious, practical stuff on their smartphones or feature-phones:

If you’re more into the consumer attitudes and marketing aspect of this and want to see ADMA’s report in full, grab it at the source link below.

[Source: ADMA’s Digital Marketing Yearbook report for 2012 (requires sign-in)]

These guys all have phones.

Despite all the discussion about 4G, 3G usage has been growing fast in China as smartphones become more prevalent. This morning, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology vice minister Shang Bing said that China now has more than 152 million 3G users nationwide, and more than 370 million mobile internet users (many are still on 2G networks).

If you want some other numbers, Mr. Shang had those as well. China now has more than 1.3 billion phone users, including over a billion mobile phone users. It has 158 million broadband internet users, and a total of more than 520 million total internet users. That’s a lot.

[via Sina Tech, image source]

Of course, what Sina’s release cleverly doesn’t say is how many of those 300 million users are “active users.” Nor does it define what it means by “active” — users who go on weibo once a day? week? month? — which is a bit shady. I have to assume that if Sina’s active user numbers were good enough it would be sharing them, so probably the fact that those numbers are conspicuously absent is an indication that active users are a pretty low percentage of that 300 million (or that Sina is counting its “active” users too generously to share the details for fear of criticism).

It’s also worth noting that Sina’s graph shows it breaking the 300 million user mark in February, before all this real-name stuff really went into effect. So far, Sina hasn’t shared any data on how that has affected user numbers, if at all. Anyway, here are some charts (English by me, charts by Sina):

There, wasn’t that fun?

[via Sina Tech]

The company has also grown substantially, now boasting over 1,000 employees, including more than 400 people on its service team. Xiaomi was criticized by some for having substandard after-sales service after its handset was released, and clearly the company is working hard to ensure that if nothing else, the service team is not understaffed. It is apparently dealing with an average of 150 customer problems per day at present.

In addition to building and training its young customer service team — most of the service staff has been at the company only a few months — Xiaomi is working on its next generation handset and building and optimizing various internal apps, like its Miliao chat platform.

It’s worth noting that Xiaomi is not a public company and isn’t required to publicly disclose any of this information; it was all surrendered voluntarily as part of an “Open Day” promotional event. That’s pretty cool; we like numbers and openness, so we hope other companies may follow Xiaomi’s lead here. Cough, cough, eedoo, cough.

[via Sina Tech]

Although Alibaba (Taobao, Tmall, etc.) is still the 800 pound gorilla in the world of Chinese e-commerce, 360Buy has been building up some momentum. At a press conference earlier today, 360Buy CMO Lan Ye shared the company’s latest (and most impressive) numbers.

Specifically, he said the site now has over forty million registered users, and that over the past two months they’ve been processing around 400,000 orders per month. He also said sales income was increasing at a rate of about 200 percent per year. That sounds pretty impressive, but it’s not a huge surprise when you consider the additions the company has been making, like hotel bookings and other travel services.

Of course, 360Buy still has a ways to go before it can become the e-commerce king. This chart, of Q4 2011 market share in the B2C space in China show’s 360Buy playing a clear second fiddle to Alibaba’s Tmall. But it also shows there’s tons of room for consolidation in this market.

[via Sina Tech]

Although that’s actually a pretty good yearly salary by Chinese standards, especially considering that smartphone users tend to be young, it might seem low to readers overseas. After all, an iPhone in China can run nearly $1,000 just for the device itself, depending in the model, options, and timing. But it’s worth noting that Chinese users typically pay much less for phone service than, say, Americans. Moreover, many Chinese smartphone users opt for cheaper 2G service rather than springing for pricier 3G plans.

The number does indiciate that the expansion of smartphone use in China could run up against a wall when the wealthier market is thoroughly saturated and people with lower incomes can’t afford the devices. But with more low-cost, high-powered devices appearing each year (see: Xiaomi), it’s likely smartphone use will continue to grow, and the average yearly salary of smartphone users may start to shrink.

[via Sina Tech]

We’ve done an awful lot of talking about weibo real-name registration here at Tech in Asia, because it’s both interesting and important. But one thing we haven’t talked about is how Sina’s half-assed approach to the real name rules has affected how many people are actually using the site.

While it’s a far cry from having any official numbers, I’ve been tracking a few key metrics since late February. Now that real name registration, at least in its current iteration, has been in place for a while, I thought it might be useful to share these numbers.

I tracked five very simple statistics: the total number of posts about the top two trending topics on any given day, the posts-per-minute count for those same two trending topics, and for kicks, the posts-per-minute count for my own personal weibo feed. I recorded all five of these stats once each workday at 2:00 P.M., from late February through last week (although I missed a few days here and there when I happened to be away from a computer at 2:00).

Now, before we start, you should take these numbers with several grains of salt, for a bunch of reasons. First of all, I collected all this manually, so there’s a chance of human errors in the data, (as evidenced by the fact that I missed a couple days). Also, as the trending topics aren’t entirely automatic — Sina can and occasionally does artificially insert or delete topics from their list — looking at them might not really be representative of the overall discussion on weibo. But with very limited time, I figured these were good, simple things to track and if there was a huge drop-off in traffic, it ought to be evident even in this flawed data.

I’ve posted charts and my own conclusions below, but you can also click on the charts to view an interactive version or take in the raw data right here. You’ll note that in order to make the charts readable, I’ve had to toss out the numbers from a few days with extremely high post counts. For example, a topic about Tomb Sweeping Day on Tomb Sweeping Day was running at more than sixty posts-per-minute; it does not appear in the graph because including it would have made it difficult to actually see any trends that might exist on more “regular” days when counts are generally much lower.

Also, for reference, the real-name rules began going into sorta-effect on March 18, and seemed to be being rolled out gradually over the next few days, so that’s the point you want to look for to see if there’s a noticeable difference before or after it.

By Total Posts

How much are people saying about the hottest social media issue of the day? Would those numbers decrease after the real name rules went into effect? I measured the total posts for the top two trending topics at 2:00 PM each day, and here’s what I found:

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Looking at these two charts, it’s difficult to see much of a pattern. There’s a definite downward slope in the number of total posts about the trending topic number two, but it isn’t mirrored in the results for number one, so it’s impossible to tell which is a more accurate depiction of what’s really happening. From the two of them, though, we can at least tell that there apparently hasn’t been a massive drop in traffic or usage, and the most interesting topics are still attracting huge numbers of posts.

Posts-per-minute

I also tracked posts-per-minute for the number one and number two trending topics using a very simple method: counting. Since all weibo posts have a timestamp, it’s actually pretty easy to figure out how many posts appeared in a trending topic’s feed within one minute’s time. What I generally did was pick a minute around 2:00 PM and count the number of posts made in that minute, and then double-check with a few other minutes around 2:00 just to be sure I hadn’t gotten a fluke and that the number I got was generally representative of how frequently people were posting about the topic. Unscientific, to be sure, but it’s better than nothing, right? Here we go:

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Here, too, it’s hard to see a definitive pattern. Maybe there’s a slight downward trend there, but it’s definitely nothing earth-shaking, and it’s clear that posts are still coming in with some frequency when the topic is hot enough.

By personal feed

Just for the heck of it, I also decided to track the posts per minute that appeared in my personal weibo feed. I only follow 71 people on weibo, so it’s a much slower trickle of posts, and I didn’t expect this data to be particularly useful, but I think it may have turned out more indicative of the reality than anything else I tracked. Here’s what I saw:

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Yup, I saw basically nothing. There’s really no pattern there at all. If I hadn’t been following the news and notified about it by Sina, I wouldn’t have even realized anything had changed.

Conclusions

I think that — nothing — is likely what most weibo users have experienced over the past few weeks. Certainly, they’re aware of the real name rules as some were forced to register, some were automatically registered and notified about it afterwards, and others had weirder things happen. But in terms of user experience, quantitatively, there doesn’t seem to have been a huge change. But of course, this is just a month or so of data from a very limited set of metrics. We’ll have to wait longer to see what the effects really are, especially if the anti-rumor campaign eventually leads to Sina being forced to implement a stricter (i.e. actually effective) real-name policy.

Qualitatively, it’s even more difficult to tell if things have changed. Has the quality of discourse altered? Are people being cowed into silence now that microblog providers theoretically have all their information on file? It’s hard to tell. Certainly the fact that rumors of a coup d’etat were being spread on weibo immediately following the real-name implementation seems to indicate the service’s political elements have not been scared into silence.

But it’s early yet, and everybody — Sina, the government, the users — are in this thing for the long haul. Let’s all keep watching.

Thinking about setting up an enterprise weibo account for your company, business, or pyramid scheme? Sina has a whole report for you — which we’ve been dissecting bit by bit by bit — but this latest piece may be more to the point: do people really want to follow enterprise weibo accounts? And if so, what kind of people? Sina’s report includes the results of a survey that offer some answers to that question.

It’s not clear from Sina’s report how many weibo users were surveyed in total, or who did the surveying, so take these results with a grain of salt or two. Anyway, here’s what weibo users said when asked how they felt about being getting personalized recommendations of enterprise weibo accounts to follow:

Does this make you more or less likely to set up an enterprise Weibo account? I suppose it depends on your target demographic, but clearly Sina thinks you’re going to be impressed by this. We’ll have more from its weibo user survey in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!

Yesterday, we took a quick first look at Sina’s enterprise weibo white paper. Enterprise weibo accounts are a big part of Sina’s push to monetize its popular social networking site — hence the fancy report — so how well they perform, and how quickly Sina can convince new businesses to sign on, is a big deal. Today, we’re diving a bit deeper into the report and taking a look at the biggest enterprise Weibo accounts.

So what companies are winning on weibo? If you take a look at the pure follower numbers, computer products for nerds (UC web browser, World of Warcraft) and shopping and sharing sites for ladies (Meilishuo, Mushroom Street, Ai Wu) dominate the list.

But anyone can buy zombies, and since these numbers were almost certainly collected before real name registration went into effect last week, what really matters is who has got the most active followers. Pinterest-y fashion sharing site Meilishuo tops that list, followed by Mushroom Street and rounded out by YinYueTai (a music platform), Weico (a weibo client), and Tmall.

It’s not a huge surprise to see so many new sites dominating this list, given that Sina’s big enterprise weibo push is also a relatively recent phenomenon. And, we’ve got to admit having nearly two million active followers is pretty impressive. Although that big gap between Meilishuo’s active and total follower counts sure makes it look like they might have bought some zombies. Just sayin’.

This chart, which we’ve translated from the report linked above, shows Sina’s breakdown of enterprise accounts by industry category. As you can see, the restaurants and dining category is way out ahead of every other industry, with nearly 50,000 registered accounts.

Click for full size.

The report says that the average enterprise weibo account has 5,000 followers and 56 percent of Sina Weibo users follow at least one enterprise account. That second number actually sounds a bit low — if I were a business owner I wouldn’t be too excited about it — but that’s just of total registered users, perhaps the percentage of active users following enterprise accounts is higher. Since Sina didn’t specifically state that, it seems pretty unlikely (companies don’t usually hide good news) but hey, uh, you never know.

In the spirit of the upcoming Consumer Rights Day (March 15), group buy tracking site Tuan 800 has published a report about customer complaints in the group buy sector during 2011. Tuan 800 is also a platform for customers to submit complaints to group buy operators, and it reports that over 2011 it received 11,812 complaints but that only 6,703 were ever resolved, meaning that more than 43 percent of group buy customer complaints from 2011 are still unresolved.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the top ten group buy sites performed the best, with a collective resolution rate of 71 percent. On the other hand, that’s down from 85.2 percent in 2010.

Of course, the complaints Tuan 800 accepted over 2011 are only a fraction of the total group buy customer complaints, as many, probably most, complaints were submitted directly to the group buy operator’s customer service department or even to the government. Beijing’s Industry and Commerce department, for example, saw group buy complaints skyrocket last year.

Still, Tuan 800′s numbers don’t look good, and many of the unresolved cases are likely to remain unresolved as more group buy operators face bankruptcy.

[Beijing News via Sina Tech, image via Shutterstock]

China Mobile (HKG:0941, NASDAQ:CHL) has been in the news recently for rather unflattering reasons (yes, China Mobile, corruption at the executive level does make you look fat), but chairman Wang Jianzhou wants to spread some good news: China Mobile has more than 15 million iPhone users.

Of course, that’s especially impressive given that China Mobile’s 3G network doesn’t support the iPhone so China Mobile iPhone users can’t get any 3G service. Although rivals China Unicom and China Telecom both offer iPhone-supporting 3G networks now, apparently millions of people just love China Mobile too much to leave it.

Of course, China Mobile isn’t planning to stay out of the iPhone game forever. According to Wang, it has been continuously in contact with Apple, and its 4G-LTE network should be friendly to future iPhones, if it ever gets off the ground. The company has been having a bit of regulatory trouble because, it seems, the Chinese government wants to further develop domestic 3G before moving on to the next technology, but China Mobile did recently expand 4G-LTE test areas to more cities and may be able to have the thing up and running in time for the iPhone 5 to come out in China (likely early 2013).

[Beijing Daily via Sina Tech]

E-commerce is growing fast in China, but the future may be in mobile e-commerce. That’s something experts have been saying for a while, and the latest data from online retailer Vancl certainly seems to back it up. According to data the company released yesterday, its mobile clients broke four million users in 2011, and its mobile site had more than ten million pageviews.

The company said that mobile users submitted three to four orders per year, and that their best day saw more than 50,000 orders come in via mobile devices. That’s especially impressive given that it didn’t even start promoting the mobile stuff until March of last year, so it hasn’t even had a full year to build up to these numbers.

So, yeah. If you didn’t know, now you know. Mobile e-commerce is gonna be big.

[via Sina Tech]

China has the most people of any nation on earth, and it’s hard to imagine that at this point it doesn’t have the most cellphones too. According to the latest data from MIIT, China will break the one billion mobile phone user barrier this month. In fact, it may already have happened.

This shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Just yesterday the chief engineer at MIIT said that China had reached 986 million mobile phone users by the end of 2011. That number increased by over ten million in January of this year according to MIIT, putting China on pace to break a billion mobile users before February draws to a close next week.

There are currently about 137 million 3G users in China, meaning that at present about 13.7 percent of China’s mobile users are on 3G.

It’s not hard to see why everyone from handset manufacturers to mobile developers is trying to break out in China. The market is gigantic, and by every measure it is still growing.

[Via Sina Tech, Image Source]

Phones. Lots of people are using them. (via New York Times)

Everyone knows China’s GDP has been climbing at a pretty astonishing rate for some time now. But the telecommunications industry is growing too, and at a conference today MIIT chief engineer Wang Xiujun announced that for the first time ever, telecom industry growth outpaced GDP growth in 2011 in China.

The overall telecom industry growth was 10 percent, Wang reported, and revenues rose 15.5 percent over the previous year for a total of over 11 trillion RMB ($1.7 trillion).

Some other impressive stats Wang shared about China’s telecom industry as of the end of 2011:

• China has 1.27 billion phone users.
• China has 986 million mobile phone users.
• China has 128 million 3G users.
• China has 156 million broadband subscribers, 84 percent of which have at least 2 Mb/sec connections.
• China has 513 million total net users.
• China has 13.5 million IPTV users.
• China has 59 million people watching video on their phones.

Impressed yet? If not, 2012 should bring further improvements. Wang said goals include better broadband penetration, three-network (phone, internet, TV) integration, and just generally making things better. Here’s hoping they’ll get to work on the abysmally slow internet.

[via Sina Tech]

In a fascinating report from Sina, citing data from China Internet Network Information Center, we see China’s web getting ever more social as it expands.

Note that this 195 million microblog figure could be polluted by duplicates as a number of Internet user might own several microblog accounts. And not forgetting that there are microblog incubators in China whose primary aim is to “nurture” the accounts and sell them on when they have a sizable number of followers. All these factors could inflate the final figure count. Nonetheless, the microblog craze is still very much in existence.

CNNIC

In the last couple of months, we have seen microblogs in China mushrooming across the web, including variations from Xinhua, Baidu, Netease, and Shanda’s Tuita. For the time being, Tencent and Sina Weibo are the two major microblogs dominating the Chinese market – with Harry Potter starlet, Emma Watson as the latest celebrity to join the Sina Weibo bandwagon.

The latest official figure from Sina Weibo boasts that it has 140 million users across Greater China – that’s mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Sina Weibo’s English version is scheduled to be released by the end of this year, and we can expect its user count to escalate if the roll-out goes smoothly.

One more interesting point is that microblogs are the third favorite online news source in China, according to a research report released by the University of Communications in Beijing.

Apart from the microblog craze in China, group-buying sites have also attracted a great deal of users to the web. The number of group-buying users has grown from 18.7 million users at the end of 2010 to 42.2 million.

For China’s netizens, their desktop PC isn’t the only channel to get online. Many Chinese get on the Internet via their mobile phones – and, guess what? There are a whopping 900 million mobile subscribers in China. No matter how you see it, China’s Internet and mobile figures are staggering.

And when you have to decide which platform to pick, what instantly comes to your mind? Is it Facebook? After all, it is the biggest social networking site and is where the people are.

A new study from ExactTarget and CoTweet reveals why how to engage your consumers on Facebook and what makes it a unique platform for marketers compared to other social networking channels.

Consumers Like Discounts on Facebook

• 40% of consumers are motivated to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook to be entitled to discounts and promotions.
• Following closely behind, 39% want to show their support for the brand
• 34% want to receive the latest updates.
• Education and interaction are the least popular (13%) reasons. It may be difficult for marketers to create conversations about your brand, try posting questions to create a dialogue.
• This result is consistent with a study by Razorfish last year

“Like” ≠ I Want To Know Anything & Everything

70% of consumers who had “FANNED” a brand on Facebook felt that they had not given this company permission to market to them. This makes sense as it tallies with the information above, if about 40% were for the promotions, apparently the remaining weren’t. Only 17% of consumers say they were more likely to buy after becoming a FAN on Facebook.

Reasons Why We Are on Facebook

• It is undeniable we use social networking sites mainly for the connections (which we believe should be dominated by women!)
  Leveraging on this information, is it possible that your campaign contain content interesting enough to be shared among friends?
• Only 15% of Facebook users are there to maintain work/professional contacts.
• While 30% of all Facebook users and45% of daily users report checking email during work or school hours, they’re less likely to check Facebook during these times, restricting use to nights and weekends. In total, 65% of Facebook users say they login only before or after work/school and 69% use Facebook on the weekends or days off.  This means marketers would need to work extra hours during weekends where traffic would be higher!

For some case studies, read five successful business pages that have done well on Facebook.

A whopping 75% of the respondents rated blog as ‘useful’ and 31% voted it as ‘critical’ to their business. This interesting statistics probably give marketers and PR people an additional reason why a corporate blog should be considered.

On the other end, MySpace took the worst record; with 62% rated it as ‘not useful’.

A blog certainly requires more time and effort. But no pain means zero gain and this is especially true when brands have decided to take the blogging route. The quality of the content and posting frequency have to be consistent to ensure effectiveness. That’s the general rule.

Strategy wise, check out our ‘4 Corporate Blogging Strategies’ article to get a head start.

Corporate Blog: Businesses with corporate blog, in general, generate more business leads than businesses which don’t. And a corporate blog doesn’t only work for B2C but also for B2B companies.

The number of business leads increases with the number of blog articles published. As long as the blog continues to generate quality content that caters to a specific target audience’s interest, business leads are almost guaranteed. 

B2B Companies: According to a survey result, B2B companies are likely to enjoy greater social media success than B2C companies. Blogs and Facebook are the two star performers for B2B companies. Surprisingly, LinkedIn, the house for business decision makers, doesn’t work too well for B2B.

More below.

This is particularly so for purchases of consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars – products where consumers are most likely to base their purchase decisions on online product reviews. But not ever country shares the same way.”

Interestingly, research shows that Koreans are more likely to share positive product reviews via social channels. On the other end, the Chinese are more likely to share negative reviews.

These simple pie charts quickly identify the difficulty to penetrate or influence a country’s digital conversations. Admittedly, interpreting the data this way may be inaccurate, as the average product quality index in a country could be the factor that affects the tone of voices.

Product Quality Still Number One

Nonetheless, the rule of thumb is still to ensure quality are delivered to the consumers. Social media can help spur and influence conversations but it could only do so much if your product isn’t providing substance. In fact, Apple has shown the world that it is possible to be one of the most talked about brands without investing a single penny in social media. Its products are able to shake the world. People want to talk about them because Apple’s products instill excitement.

Without substance, whether your products are marketed to the Korean or Japanese market, no one with the right mind would give you a positive product review.

So, are your products providing quality? Think twice before investing resources on promotion channels.

Among the tops that are most read and commented, are entertainment, food and health/wellness. Fashion, shopping and beauty are positioned fifth in the list.

1 out of 5 woman tends to look out for advice and recommendation through social-networking sites, providing additional incentive for women centric businesses to create thought leadership in the digital landscape.

So, for our women readers, does this set of data applies to you? Let us know via comments!

Stock photo powered by Pixmac

Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn, a professional social-networking platform, where user base mainly consists of high profile executives and people who’re more business oriented, is used by 75% of the respondents. 94% also use marketing analytics like Google Analytics or sentimental analysis to keep track of their digital performance.

Through chats with several B2B marketers, I observed that most don’t see the need for a social media strategy. The reason? Because laymen users, like you and me aren’t within their targeted list of audience.

Yes, laymen don’t bring a B2B focused company direct revenue. But it mustn’t be forgotten that we are the ones who would eventually consume the product, your product. Paying some attention to us helps build awareness and improve your branding. If we were to buy more, your distributors would have to take more orders from you. Now, isn’t that revenue?

More B2B Marketing Resource

1. The Big B2B Social Media Marketing Plan

2. 5 B2B Companies and Luxury Brands On Social Media

3. 5 B2B Social Media Marketing Benefits

For more marketing and social media news and info, connect with us via Twitter and Facebook.

So what could people talk about? Besides “hi and bye”, these people could be talking about your brand. It highlights the importance of providing excellent products and customer service. Inferior products spur negative buzz (we have got some disturbing statistics here) while on the contrary, brands that produce quality goods are often mentioned on Twitter.

This infographic, created by Flowtown, has illustrated how social engagement is changing with time. Such statistics have placed more pressure on brands to start listening and participating in these conversations. Those that did are often handsomely rewarded, typically in a period of disaster. We have seen how Boeing turned a potential disaster into applause and also how Wholefoods has effectively managed a backlash. All these are achieved through effective listening and participating.

Now, here’s the breathtaking statistics!

Despite a flattened traffic growth, Twitter is growing at a rapid pace in terms of user growth. It has gathered over 105 million registered users and is gaining 300,000 new users daily.

Another infographic also mentioned that Twitter suffers from low retention rate…

Only 4 out of 10 new users continued to use the service and many of them quit Twitter within a month. So, if the statistics  are accurate, we can deduce that Twitter only has about 40 million active users (105 x 40%). That’s just 10% of what Facebook has, confirming that Facebook is the undisputed champion so far.

[Click to enlarge image]

[via thenextweb]

The chart shows a huge disparity between Facebook and the other social networking sites in terms of unique visits. Facebook is the only obvious site that is experiencing an upward trending growth while others clustered at the bottom of the chart. LinkedIn and Twitter also appear to be growing at a steady pace but definitely in a different league from Facebook.

Regardless, both Twitter and LinkedIn serve different needs and aren’t much of a threat to Facebook (yet). Looking at this direction, the chart has taught us a simple business lesson: “To win, we have to differentiate from our competitors”. LinkedIn (professional networking) and Twitter (mirco-blogging) are two successful product differentiation examples.

[via businessinsider]

A study conducted by BlogHer site confirms this trend. Apart from search engines, blogs (53%), user generated content (46%) and social networking sites (26%) are among the favorite online research destinations.

If your business hasn’t utilized social channels like Facebook, Twitter and blog to generate online visibility, you have compelling reasons to do so now.

Stats Relevant To The  U.S Only

Social media is by no means going to replace search engines anytime soon. So, to achieve optimal online marketing success, both searching engine marketing (pay-per-click ads and search engine optimization) and social media marketing have to work together hand in hand.

And before rushing to join the social media wave, it is also important to note that this set of statistics applies only to the U.S population. If the U.S isn’t your target country, it is advisable to do some research before diving straight into action.

Facebook ad data could provide you with the necessary information you need.

Nonetheless, it isn’t a silver bullet and definitely isn’t always working great for businesses.  Online backlashes and productivity losses are some of the things that highlight the ugly side of social media.  We have dug out four interesting statistics below to show you what we mean.

4 Disturbing Statistics

#1. Employees Visit Facebook 7 Out Of 100 Times At Work

Network Box reported that 7 out of 100 URLs accessed by businesses were directed to Facebook and 10% of Internet bandwidth went to YouTube.

What it means: When your employees log on to the web, 7% of the time is to access social media for their personal use. Your entire workforce productivity is at risk.

#2. 1 In 5 Likely To Lash Out At Brands Online

A research by Euro RSCG Worldwide showed that people do not practice as much self control in their online behavior as they would offline. They are more likely to speak their mind and lash out about/at brands through online means – every 1 in 5 people are likely to do so.

What it means: Great customer service is increasingly important as social media gains in popularity. So, try not to play around with customers, especially those who are social media savvy. Evergreen Entertainment has already tasted “social media’s wrath”.

#3. Businesses: “Twitter Costs Us $1.4 Billion”

Staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year.

What it means: Twitter, similar to Facebook and YouTube are time suckers. For companies that wish to maximize social media potential, and at the same time maintain work productivity, a social media usage policy might come in handy.

#4. Each Negative Social Media Comment Costs 30 Customers

A research by Convergys Corp. has shown that a negative customer review on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook can cost a company about 30 customers.

What it means: Poor service and lousy product cannot escape the eyes of potential consumers in today’s digital age. Google and social sites facilitate all sorts of reviews about your company.

Conclusion

Social media is a double edged sword and it is up to businesses to make full use of its potential. For example: a negative remark on social media equates to a loss of 30 potential customers, but it also means that a positive review could possibly help you gain 30 new customers.

Other negative impact like productivity loss can be countered if companies set proper corporate culture and guidelines. Zappos didn’t seem to have a problem with its high involvement in social media. Your business probably can do the same too.

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/4-disturbing-social-media-statistics-for-businesses/feed/ 3 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/1-out-of-4-will-pay-for-twitter-business-accounts/ http://www.techinasia.com/1-out-of-4-will-pay-for-twitter-business-accounts/#comments Sat, 17 Apr 2010 16:41:24 +0000 Willis Wee http://www.techinasia.com/?p=16430 Read more »]]> It is very likely that Twitter would be launching its business accounts soon, as several companies are currently testing out its corporate platform. The corporate accounts, according to co-founder Biz Stone, will provide businesses with statistics to measure their Twitter performance.

We can expect the usual web measurement metrics, such as click through rate, tweet sentiments and retweet rate. The rest are unknown as Twitter remains tight lipped. A survey study by WebBizIdeas, an Internet marketing solutions company, has revealed that only 26% of US business Twitter users are willing to pay for such business functionality.

That is only about 1 out of every 4 businesses. With Twitter sending unclear signals about how its corporate accounts could help businesses grow, we should take the statistics with a pinch of salt.

Besides Twitter’s corporate accounts, the recently launched promoted tweets platform is also a highlight of this study. When asked what Twitter advertising tactics would provide the most value to businesses, almost 70% of them suggested old school price per click and price per impression approaches. Also, only 1 out of 5 businesses value Twitter followership.

Clearly, web traffic of Twitter matters more to businesses since click through rate is more valued over Twitter following count.

This study tells us one thing – the more we tweet, the more addicted we get. Perhaps the addiction kicks in when a Twitter user gains more followers over time.  A Twitter infographic that we previously shared also confirms this fact.

Most Twitter users have less than 5 followers, and it was also stated that most newbies drop Twitter after a month of usage, thus explaining the stagnant growth in tweet volume.

Newbie Stigma?

Twitter is a great social-networking cum micro-blogging site only when a user’s existence is felt. A new user might find it hard to fit into the Twitter community, especially since many users only follow others with a big following. Whichever way we see it, Twitter suffers most from this “newbie stigma,” and helping new users to fit into the Twitter community can prove to be a huge challenge.

Any thoughts on this “newbie stigma”? Let us know via comments.

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[Source: eMarketer]

3 pieces of information that I find particularly interesting are: (1) most Twitter users drop their account after a month, (2) Wednesday and Thursday are the most Twitter active days and, (3) 8pm at EST usually has the highest volume of tweets.

What are yours?

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Click to enlarge the image.