China is a country with a vibrant mobile and internet market.
Some key figures :
Internet users : 132 million as of December 06, 10% penetration
Broadband subscribers : 104 million in December 06
Advertising market : in the first half of 2006, the market size of the online advertisement in China has come to 2.06 billion yuan, a growth of 50% compared with 1.37 billion yuan in the same period of 2005 (source: iResearch).
Domain names : 1.8 million “.cn” domains registered
Chinese players :
- Tencent : company operating several services :
- QQ.com : leading instant mobile messaging community
- announced in its 2006 Q3 report that it has 221.4 million active users (registered users went to 572 million !)
- Q coins : a virtual currency / payment system, even threatening the Yuan, according to this Asia Times piece
- QQ.com : leading instant mobile messaging community
- Baidu.com : leading chinese search engine, dubbed the “Chinese Google” (and leading in market share : 55% Baidu vs 21% Google), IPO in August 2005 (with a fourfold stock price increase on the first day of trading)
- Sina.com : major portal, with 230 million registered users.
- Netease ( 163.com) : portal with online games, mobile value-added services.
Sources :
- CNNIC : China Internet Network Information Center
- iResearch : China Internet Research Center
- article in China Today about QQ’s founder, Pony Ma
- Blogging in China : by end 2006, 20 million bloggers in China, according to this article
- Market overview by l’Atelier (in French)
- Memedia, a chinese bloggers collective / magazine, translated into English by Nan Yang at the Global Voices Online )
- China Internet and Telecoms stats by Internet World Stats.
