Thu, 08/05/2010 – 05:44 by Nielsen offers some very interesting
data on China’s mobile market, based on almost 5,000 face-to-face consumer interviews, and compares it to mobile behavior in the US. The finding: a higher percentage of Chinese subscribers use the mobile Internet than their US counterparts.
Just over 37% of China’s 755 million mobile phone subscribers in China access the Internet on their handsets. That represents roughly 279 million people overall. In the US there are 77 million mobile Internet users, representing about 27% of subscribers, according to the most recent Nielsen estimates.
The size of the Chinese market is currently about three times larger than the US market. However there’s much more growth potential in China vs. the US, which is already a mature market in terms of subscriber penetration. By contrast just over half of China’s population has a mobile phone. And China is one of those developing markets where primary Internet access is very quickly likely to be via mobile vs. a PC.
The mobile market in China is almost equally split between men and women and different age groups. Almost 90% (87%) are pre-paid subscribers. Below is the breakdown of mobile activities by category and then a comparison with US mobile user behavior.
