CNNIC Report Breaks Down China’s Mobile Browsers: UCWeb, Tencent Dominating

Stats alert! CNNIC — an agency under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that manages several aspects of China’s internet — has released a new report with lots of details about how China’s mobile browser market is shaping up. The big number is this: China now has 278 million mobile browser users. That accounts for 71.7 percent of China’s total mobile web users. Sixty percent of these mobile browser users are men, and 34 percent of them make under 3000 RMB ($476) a month, but unsprisingly there’s not a huge demographic difference between mobile web users in general and mobile browser users in specific:

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.