Number of Chinese mobile phone subscribers dropped slightly in May from the prior month

This morning, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said that the number of Chinese who subscribe to a mobile communication service declined ever so slightly last month on a sequential basis, but rose year-over-year. For May, there were 1.292 billion Chinese with a mobile phone account in the country. That is down .05% from April, but up 2.86% from the number who had such an account in May 2014. 58.81 billion text messages were sent in China during May. Each phone in use averaged 1.49 texts a day. Data consumption equaled a whopping 307,792TB

The number of Chinese cited by MIIT as having a mobile subscription in China last month, equals 94.6% of the country's population. Compare that to the 242.43 million in China that have an account for fixed line telephone service. That means that just 17.9% of the Chinese population are using the older technology in the country.

Returning to China's 1.292 billion mobile phone users, 455.84 million of them are connecting to a 3G pipeline (35.27%). With only 200.77 million (15.54%) connected to a 4G signal, there is plenty of opportunity for the country's top mobile operators to migrate users to 4G from 3G. Most of China's mobile users do have an internet connection. 896.94 million (69.4%) of the country's mobile phone users access the internet using the mobile browser on their handset.

source: DigiTimes