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95% of netizens are mobile users with a high rate of mobile payments being recorded.
China’s internet and mobile internet development has come of age. The 39th market survey from the China Internet Information Center (CNNIC) indicates that there are 731 million Chinese netizens, a 42.99 million user increase as compared with last year. The internet access rate has reached 53.2%, which is equivalent to the population of Europe, and is 3.1% higher than the global average and 7.6% higher than Asia. Mobile users have increased at a fast rate and now account for 95.1% of the netizens (695 million out of 731 million netizens are mobile users). Netizens using mobile payments are now recorded at 470 million. The online and offline payments are now part of people’s daily lives.
The development of the Online to Offline (O2O) mode drives the population of mobile users to 695 million
Mobile users have grown by 10% in the past three years. The cumulative number of mobile users as of December 2016 was 695 million. Nowadays, the rate of mobile phone users is increasing while that of the desktop and laptop computers is decreasing. It is partly due to the popularity of the mobile internet along with the development of the offline O2O mode. The user rate rankings of these devices for surfing is; mobile phone (95.1%), desktop computer (60.1%), laptop computer (36.8%), tablet (31.5%) and television (25%).
The user rate of online and offline payments exceeds 50%
Mobile users have grown rapidly which has seen a surge in the amount of mobile payments being recorded, now totalling 469 million; a year-by-year growth of 31.2%. The percentage of user making mobile online payments has increased from 57.7% to 67.5%. The rise of O2O mode promotes offline payments. 50.3% mobile users tend to use mobile payments in a variety of shops. The popularity of mobile payments in China is considerably higher than many other countries.
Online taxi service is developing
There are 168 million online taxi service users in the Sharing Economy, 37.9% higher than the first half of 2016. After a series of mergers, a period of consolidation and policy refinements, the online taxi service is constantly developing.
There are 91 listed internet companies in China
As for the internet business, there are 91 listed internet companies in China, including those being listed domestically and overseas. The market value of these companies now exceeds 870 billion USD. Tencent and Alibaba are two representative internet companies in China. The market value of these two companies alone exceeds 435 billion accounting for 57% of listed internet companies market in China.
30% of netizens use the internet service platform provided by the government
With the rapid development of traditional and modern medias, the internet plays a critical role in China’s businesses. 38.7% of Chinese companies market and promote their businesses through the internet. Online sales and buying are at 45.3% and 45.6%, respectively. Both gaining more than 10% growth. Not only more and more Chinese companies value the application of internet, the internet also drove over 30% of China’s netizens taking care of business online using governmental internet service platforms, pushing for the growth of development of a service-oriented government.