The jobs were provided by 22,000 companies, according to the analysis of the city’s human resources by the Shanghai Labor and Social Security Bureau.

Compared with the same period last year, job supply has increased 20.7 percent, the report said.

The service industry and retail industry created the most job vacancies, accounting for 48.4 percent of the total supply. A decreasing trend continued in demand for jobs in the insurance industry. Demand has now dropped for three consecutive quarters.

However, job demand in real estate rose again in the second quarter of this year, reversing a drop over the past three quarters.

Manufacturing, marketing, purchasing and customer services boasted the biggest actual demand for laborers in the second quarter, while the biggest increase occurred in demand for security guards. Compared with the first quarter, the number of security guards employed increased 2.2 percent.

Posts in industries such as engineering and technology, creative design, dining and entertainment dropped.

Shanghai’s Pudong New Area created the most job vacancies, accounting for 17.6 percent of the city’s total demand. Xuhui District accounted for 13.3 percent.

A slight increase in job demand came from the city’s outskirts compared with the first quarter.

The report found the average age of job seekers had declined while their education levels had improved.

Those seeking work had an average age of 29.7 - 1.1 years younger than those in the first quarter.

The analysis showed that the ratio of job seekers with an education of junior college or above continued to grow, reaching 47 percent. Those with middle school education or below dropped.

An analysis of job opening-to-application ratios showed competition remained fierce among professional and technical job hunters.

The ratios in the non-metal mining industry reached 0.05, which means behind each post there were 20 candidates competing for the job.

The findings were based on a survey carried out in four municipalities directly under the central government — Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing — and 15 developed cities such as Changchun, Dalian, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Jinan and Guangzhou, among others.

About 8.4 billion yuan (around 1.2 billion U.S. dollars) — more than half of the total — came from male consumers, while 3.1 billion yuan (450 million U.S. dollars) were attributed to students.

The consumer-to-consumer (C2C) site Taobao.com, a subsidiary of online portal Alibaba.com in which Yahoo! invested 1 billion U.S. dollars in 2005, was the nation’s dominant Internet retailer. It had an online shopping penetration rate of 81.5 percent.

Dangdang.com was second with 16.6 percent, followed by Joyo, Amazon’s China subsidiary, with 13.6 percent. Eachnet, owned by Tom Online and eBay, had 8.4 percent, while Tencent’s C2C site Paipai.com was 7.2 percent.

According to the CNNIC, 91 percent of online shoppers who had heard of Taobao had made purchases at the site, while 61.4 percent of those familiar with Joyo had shopped there.