For the first time ever, smartphones have outpaced PCs in China, the world's most populous country, for accessing the internet.
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) published the latest findings on internet usage statistics in China, Monday. The agency said smartphone users in China surpassed PC users in accessing the internet in the country.
According to Monday's report (in Chinese), China served 632 million internet users as of June, up 2.3 percent from 618 million internet users at the end of 2013, Reuters reports The smartphone adoption has increased since last year as 527 million or 83 percent of the total internet users accessed web and web-related services from smartphones and tablets. Comparatively, PCs made up 81 percent of the total.
The upward trend in internet usage via mobile devices comes directly from the rapid growth of smartphone usage. China is the largest smartphone market in the world and is likely to make nearly one-third of the expected 1.8 billion smartphones that will be shipped in 2018, according to IDC data analytics firm.
CNNIC also showed that Chinese internet users accessed instant chat services like Tencent's Weixin, or WeChat, online music, video games and online books. Of all types of internet use, online payments rose the fastest, increasing 12.3 percent since December last year to 292 million people. The new trend means good business for e-commerce giants such as Alibaba Group and JD.com.
While other internet related categories saw a jump, use of social networking sites and microblogs plummeted. The report added that the number of users on the social networking sites declined 7.4 percent to 257 million and microblogs like Sina Weibo witnessed a 1.9 percent drop to 275 million. Media reports attributed the decline to the government crackdown on social sites that started last year.
