Chinese press agency Xinhua has released a statement saying that the number of people using mobile phones in the country has crossed 1.22 billion by the end of October 2013. The country of 1.36 billion is fast approaching 100 % mobile phone penetration, it seems. The number of 1.2 billion is a truly mind boggling number. To put things into perspective, this number is only slightly lower than the entire population of India which stands at little over 1.23 billion as of now.
The data was complied by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and was released on November 21. Some more statistics from the data include the fact that 67.19 percent (817 million users) of these mobile phone users are connected to the Internet. Out of those, roughly 34.5 percent of subscribers use 3G data. While mobile phones continue their staggering growth rate, land lines and fixed connections are shrinking fast in the country. In fact, there are 8.82 million fewer land line phones now than there were back in January 2013. This figure is still a large number at 269 million people at the end of October.
China;s Guangdong, Henan and Sichuan provinces boast of showcasing the fastest most mobile phone user growth rate during the course of 2013. It would be interesting to see how long this growth rate continues now that almost the entire population of China has been covered.
