Tag: smartphone trends

Mobile phones are used for internet access by half the Chinese population

| January 28, 2016

According to a recent report, approximately 620 million people in China use smartphone to go online.

A new official report from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has said that around 620 million people in the country – about half of its population – use their mobile phones in order to access the web.

These figures were collected throughout last year and represented the statistics as of the end of December 2015.

This figure represents an increase of 63.03 million users of mobile phones for accessing the internet, last year. It is also a figure that represents about 90.1 percent of the total number of internet users in China, which is estimated to be 688 million. This helps to further illustrate the importance of mobile devices as a driver in the internet user population in China. Smartphones have allowed the country to achieve the highest internet using population in the world, by far, said the CNNIC.

That said, it is important to note that the users of those mobile phones experience the same online restrictions.

Mobile Phone Use in ChinaThe Chinese government imposes strict controls over the content that is permitted online. Despite the fact that e-commerce is among the core components of its efforts to convert its economy into one that is more consumer demand based, these regulations remain. In fact, the system currently in place has been called the “Great Firewall of China”, blocking out any content it has determined to be politically sensitive.

The CNNIC report showed that there are about 127 million people in China whose internet access is exclusively over mobile phones. Broad efforts have been made within the country in order to help to boost the internet coverage and, as a result, public services, the standard of living and e-commerce have all benefitted.

The statistics offered by the report have predicted that the number of people who are using mobile health, mobile wallets or online education over smartphones had reached the 152 million, 358 million and 110 million mark, respectively, last year. Furthermore, an estimated 96.6 million people in the country – that is, one in every 14 people in China – used a mobile device in order to call a cab in 2015.

M-commerce brought $12.7 billion in sales to retailers over the holidays

| January 15, 2016

According to figures released by comScore, smartphones played a notably larger role in overall online shopping.

comScore has released its holiday shopping data and has revealed that m-commerce generated $12.7 billion in sales, while online shopping as a whole brought in a tremendous $69 billion.

These figures show that mobile commerce is growing fast but desktop shopping is growing slower than predicted.

This revealed that it really was m-commerce that was dominating the scene in terms of growth rate during the holiday season. This growth rate was considerably larger than that of PC based purchases. Moreover, it was also pointed out that regardless of whether or not a sale was made, the traffic that was seen on websites was greater on mobile devices than it was on desktops and laptops. Smartphone based shopping also rose rapidly from 2014 to 2015. In fact, comScore recorded the rate of growth during that span of time as being 59 percent.

This shows very rapid growth for m-commerce, though not as quick as what some had forecasted.

m-commerce - huge holiday salescomScore recorded that the total e-commerce sales that occurred from November 1 through December 31, 2015 came to an estimated $69.08 billion. That research firm had previously predicted that the figure would have been closer to $70.01 billion during that span of time.

While mobile commerce did manage to exceed the forecast that comScore had put forward, desktop didn’t manage to do the same thing. Instead, it fell short of the predicted total by close to $2 billion. Once again, the largest single day for online shopping was on Cyber Monday, which fell on November 30, last year. On that one day, there were $2.3 billion in sales completed online.

That said, while there are a large number of analyses being released with regards to the totals in sales of e- and m-commerce, many analysts are saying that it is short-sighted to try to think of the sales as occurring either on one type of environment or another. Instead, many reports are starting to acknowledge that the line between online and offline sales, and the line between PC and mobile devices is quite blurred as consumers will often cross from one environment into another and, perhaps, back again before a final purchase is made.