Q2 data just released by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology point to rapid mobile internet services adoption…
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The data suggests a tenth of Chinese mobile subscribers are registered to an app store, but smartphones are a minority of the circulated handsets.
*Apple* opportunity?
China is already Apple’s number-two apps market. Only China Unicorn currently has iPhone carriage. But China Mobile and China Telecom are each now angling for the handset for offerings that would typically subsidise iPhones to consumers in deals that would leave Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) “the biggest winner”, Reuters reports.
Apple COO Tim Cook said last week’ Apple is only “scratching the surface” of China with four stores, and a nine percent smartphone share according to Gartner.
‘Tweets’ blossoming
China’s “weibo” (or, microblogging) craze is continuing apace. A horrific train crash that killed 35 Saturday night, in which some stranded passengers posted SOS messages from stricken carriages, is the latest example, according to Xinhua. After a trend in which people post pictures of missing street kids, a father was reunited with his child recently, and there is also local enthusiasm for using weibos to connect people with public services.
They are the kind of revolutions in news and public communications that the west has realised in recent years. “The first published picture of the crash site did not come from traditional media, but from a Wenzhou resident,” the Sichuan Cellphone Press said, according to Xinhua. “From blood donations to on-the-spot rescues, everything has been shot from the air. The power of ‘we-media’ is overwhelming!”
China has 485 million active Internet users. Microblog users surged from 63.11 million to 195 million during the first half of the year.