Categories: Mobile

China approaches one billion mobile subscribers

Apple's iconic store in Shanghai

China recorded 973.7 million mobile subscribers at the end of 2011, and is on track to surpass the one billion connections milestone by early spring, according to a report by Wireless Intelligence.

Mobile subscriptions in China are growing at a rate of 16% each year. With a population of over 1.3 billion and mobile market penetration estimated at 72%, the report suggests that the industry still has major opportunities for further expansion. Compare this to the United States where mobile subscriptions currently exceed the population by about 16 million – many consumers have multiple devices capable of connecting to the internet.

3G data connections reached 200 million, or one-fifth of all connections in China, with 3G-capable devices accounting for 80% of all recent sales.

Currently only one of China’s mobile operators, China Unicom, is offering Apple iPhone products and has been doing so exclusively since 2009. Despite being limited to a single operator, China has already become Apple’s second-most important market outside of the United States, illustrating just how lucrative the mobile market has become there in recent years. In fact, the greater China region accounted for 12% of Apple’s full-year revenue for 2011.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

Recent Posts

Fintech lifeline for banks as rising consumer living costs hinder debt collection

Banks have moved from feast to famine amidst a spike in the number of financial…

7 hours ago

Mars Petcare and Michelson Found Animals want to make life easier for pet owners with Leap Venture Studio startup accelerator 

Being a pet owner can be hard. For one, according to researchers from the University…

8 hours ago

“A Lowercase ‘C’ Cost Me £550K”: CEO Shares Lessons Learned from Private Equity Earn-Out (Brains Byte Back podcast)

In this episode of Brains Byte Back, Erick Espinosa sits down with Sam Oliver, CEO…

1 day ago

A look into the edtech startup landscape in Southeast Asia

Education technology (edtech) is once again among the top sectors in Southeast Asia (SEA) for…

4 days ago

SQream Blue: the data preparation lakehouse setting new performance standards  

There is no single right big data solution. Organizations are most likely to succeed with…

4 days ago

Transformers: Navigating the New Era of Attention in Technology

In 2017, a group of researchers (from Google and the University of Toronto) introduced a…

1 week ago