{ design@tive } information design

The number of new mobile subscribers hit a record high of 8.48 million in January, taking Chinese total mobile users to exceed 555 million, accounting for 41.6% of the country’s population (user density), sending over 54 billion short messages, averaging 3.17 per phone number a day.

The continuous falling of handset prices and user charges has directly led to a sharp increase in the number of mobile phone subscribers, Wang Lijian, a spokesman with the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) told Xinhua on recently.

Mobile phones are becoming must-have items for every Chinese person, Wang said.

Meanwhile, the number of fixed-line subscribers shrank nearly 1.5 million to less than 364 million, the sixth month of decline in a row, according to the latest figures from the ministry.

The ministry forecast last month that China’s phone subscribers total, mobile and fixed line combined, are expected to hit 976 million in 2008, with mobile phone subscribers accounting for 46.4percent of the population.

By the end of 2007, China had 365 million fixed-line subscribers and 547 million mobile subscribers, the two figures combined accounted for a fifth of the world’s total phone subscribers, according to the MII.

The Chinese People and their Mobile Phones: over 555 million mobile phone users by Itamar Medeiros, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 5:34 am and is filed under population, market, china, information technology, consumer behavior, trends, mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.