China’s internet users zoom to 668 million

Smartphones have overtaken personal computers and tablets to become the ultimate gateway for those who want to connect to the Internet in China, said a report released on Thursday.

The number of Internet users in China continued to grow in the first half of this year, with about 90 percent of the users accessing the internet through mobile phones, said the semi-annual report of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

As might be expected with a boom in smartphone usage, user figures for mobile online services have also increased. By the end of June, about 594 million Chinese accessed the Internet through their smartphones, said the CNNIC.

The study also found that almost 89 percent of China’s internet customers went online using smartphones, compared with 85.8 percent at end-2014. Even with the recent urbanization, China’s rural population still exceeds 600 million according to 2014 World Bank data, and CNNIC says that just 27.9 percent of those people are online. Most of the online users are aged between 20 and 29 and are mainly students and freelancers.

Conversely, the number of people using laptops or desktop PCs to access the internet fell to 42.5 per cent and 68.4 per cent respectively.

The overall growth in China’s Internet users has already flattened, but there is still huge potential for growth in the rural regions.

Moreover, rural web development is happening fairly slowly; China’s rural web users have grown by just 8 million over the past six months, according to CNNIC.