China sold almost 500m smartphones in 2015, and other crazy data

Photo by Leniners

How big is China’s smartphone market? Absolutely massive, according to the latest report released by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). China sold 457 million smartphones in 2015, up 17.7 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry. That means around 35 percent of China’s population bought a new smartphone last year.

MIIT also dumped a bunch of other data on China’s telecom industry in 2015:

• China now has more than 1.3 billion mobile phone users. That means that virtually everyone in the Middle Kingdom has a mobile phone.
• China has 213 million fixed broadband connections, and about 70 percent of those boast speeds of 8 Mbps or higher (the nationwide average just a couple years ago was much lower).
• China has 785 million mobile broadband users (people who access the web via mobile devices including but not limited to smartphones)
• China gained 289 million new 4G subscribers in 2015, and the total number of 4G users now sits at 386 million.
• China used 4.2 billion gigabytes of mobile data in 2015, more than double what it used the previous year.

It’s worth pointing out that MIIT’s data isn’t necessarily unassailable. In fact, its numbers often seem to conflict with the numbers released by CNNIC, another Chinese internet authority that’s actually part of MIIT. For example: MIIT’s report says that China had 785 million mobile broadband users in 2015, but CNNIC’s data says that China’s total internet userbase in 2015 was only 688 million.

The cause of the discrepancy isn’t clear. Perhaps MIIT is counting each mobile device as a single user, whereas CNNIC is counting one person with several web-ready devices as a single user; I can’t be sure. But these numbers, like almost all numbers publicly released by Chinese government authorities, should probably be taken with a grain of salt.