China now has half a billion mobile web users, 618 million total internet users

China now has 618 million internet users and 500 million mobile web users, according to new figures today from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

The new numbers from CNNIC are for December 2013. They show strong growth from the agency’s last report midway through 2013 when we saw that China had 591 million internet users and 460 million mobile netizens. The number of mobile web users has more than doubled from the end of 2009 when there were only 233 million accessing the web via phones.

China’s smartphone boom – there are about 270 million active Android users in the country right now – has surely caused a big bump in mobile web browsing in the past few years.

This is the graph for total web users. The precise figure for the end of 2013 is 617.58 million:

Here’s the graph for mobile web:

Getting online

Here are some more of the latest figures from CNNIC:

• China’s internet penetration rate is now up to 45.8 percent
• The number of mobile web users rose 19.1 percent from 2012 to 2013
• 81.0 percent of China’s internet users are accessing it via phones – that’s up from 74.5 percent in 2012
• China now has 247 million online video viewers – that’s more than doubled from 112 million in 2012

E-commerce in China

The report estimates that China has also crossed a major milestone in terms of e-commerce, with a total of 302 million e-shoppers. No such figure was given in the last report.

(Editing by Paul Bischoff)