60 percent of Chinese users’ time on mobile is on a Baidu, Alibaba, or Tencent app: report

Yesterday, on the heels of a less-than-stellar earnings report, Baidu released a study tracking Chinese behavior on mobile devices for the year 2014. The company drew from mobile search, data from Baidu Mobile Assistant (one of its app stores), and Baidu Mobile Statistics (an analytics service for developers) to gather research.

While there are no new earth-shattering data points, there’s a few choice tidbits worth sharing that reinforce how Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent own lots of valuable real estate in the country’s mobile landscape.

For starters – Baidu’s data indicates that Apple increased its market share between Q2 and Q4 of 2014, while Samsung lost market share to Chinese manufacturers in that same period. This follows an ongoing stream of data pointing to the same phenomenon.

According to Baidu, in most app categories, the leading three apps collectively make up more than 70 percent market share. Not surprisingly, categories that rely on quality data and network effects appear to attract the most dominance, while categories where app quality is more subjective tend to attract less dominance.

Almost 60 percent of time spent on a mobile device in China is spent on an app affiliated with Baidu, Tencent, or Alibaba. That figure seems to be growing with time.

Baidu claims that it accounts for 23 percent of all mobile internet revenues, and that the percentage of its total revenue derived from mobile exceeds that of its competitors. Buyer beware for this slide –  this research is from Baidu, not a neutral third party.