Everyone in China loves their smartphones, but people are using surprisingly little data each month

China has about 520 million active smartphone users right now. Unlike in most of Asia’s developing nations, China’s smartphone market is mature and close to its saturation point. Despite all this well-established growth, China’s smartphone users are still using surprisingly little data each month – in fact, they’re using just a quarter of the global average.

New numbers from China’s tech ministry, MIIT, shows that mobile users in China now consume an average of 200MB of data each month (as spotted by Reuters). While that figure is going up, it’s still way below the global monthly average of 819MB.

Globally, the average smartphone will generate 3,981 MB of mobile data traffic / month by 2019, up from 819 MB/month in 2014, a CAGR of 37%.

— Hani Raad (@HaniRaad) February 5, 2015

China’s mobile data usage has grown slowly from an average of 122.8 MB per month in mid-2013.

200MB is pretty small. It’s the equivalent of downloading or streaming 50 songs or two short TV shows.

It seems even smaller when you recall that 4G launched in China at the end of 2013. The nation has about 500 million 3G subscribers, but that number should soon fall as people gradually move over to similarly priced 4G data packages. 400MB of monthly mobile data (3G or 4G) costs about US$12 on China’s three telcos.

See: China now has 557M mobile internet users, grand total of 649M netizens

(Source: Reuters)