How China is Pushing Forward the Mobile Internet in 2012 [CHARTS]

In the gradual but massive shift to the mobile internet, Asia is leading the way. The continent has seen 192.5 percent growth in mobile internet traffic (pictured below) in recent years – way more than any other region. Pushing all this forward is China, with just over a billion mobile subscribers coupled with a fast-expanding middle class that’s taking Asia’s mobile web the way of smartphones and 3G connectivity.

Let’s unpack China’s role in this – from apps to mobile OS to lifestyles – with help from a new report from UCWeb [1], makers of the popular UC Browser. This infographic uses data from Statcounter. And bear in mind here that Cisco has projected (as cited by UCWeb) that Asia, with all that growth, will generate the most mobile internet traffic in the world by 2015.

To back up Cisco’s vision, this graph highlights the sheer number of people and mobiles in China in 2015 that’ll be generating all those mobile web clicks and swipes:

And, as we already know, the turning point has already been reached, with mobile internet users surpassing in number those on desktop PCs earlier this year in China:

Of course, everybody needs to be included in the mobile web so that things like m-commerce can prosper. Budget smartphones will be at the heart of that, and Chinese phone-makers have been particularly adept at making sub–1,000 RMB (US$158) and off-contract devices that are attractive and open up the whole world of Android apps:

That socioeconomic need for a fairer range of prices in smartphones has helped keep Nokia afloat in China for a while – but Nokia’s old Symbian phones are still plummeting in demand among consumers. And so China is an Android nation, with the iPhone accounting for only 7.5 percent of smartphone market share in the country at 2012 Q2 (in contrast to 34 percent for the iPhone in the US). Most of those Samsung, Lenovo, Coolpad, Huawei, and ZTE sales are Android phones: