China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published statistics which reveal that the country’s mobile subscriber base has crossed 1.104 billion users as of November 2012. This is an increment of close to 118 million subscribers over the course of 11 months. The national telecom business volume has gone up 11.4% over the same period last year with a total of 1.18601 trillion yuan.
Approximately 82% of China’s population uses a mobile phone with about 20% of that (approximately 220 million) using 3G equipped devices. The Chinese smartphone market remains one of the most rapidly increasing territories and will top the combined US iOS & Android install base in 2013. There are about 167 million iOS and Android devices in use. Gartner had previously reported that Lenovo is set to steal the spot for number one manufacturer from Samsung in 2013. With the amount of innovation being seen in China by the likes of Huawei, ZTE amongst others, we expect Android based smartphones to help increase the smartphone userbase multifold over the next year.
[Source – MIIT]