14 DAY TRIAL // What better time for an update on the market with the highest number of Internet users in the world, China, than now that Google is threatening to leave it. Unsurprisingly, the number of people online continued to surge reaching 384 million at the end of 2009, a huge 13.6 percent increase from just six months earlier. The numbers come from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) the organization which handles domain names and other Internet-related issues in the country. It's not directly linked to the government, but it does have some close ties.
According to the latest numbers, almost one in three Chinese citizens are online, 28.9 percent to be exact, which the report claims is higher than the global average which stands at 25.6 percent. This is a huge increase of 86 million Internet users in just one year.
Even more impressive, if accurate, is the broadband penetration rate as the report claims that more than 90 percent of fixed Internet connections in China, 346 million, are broadband connections. It isn't clear what the report labels as broadband, but 90 percent is a number than even the most developed countries in the world struggle to reach.
The numbers are even bigger on the mobile front as 233 million people went online using mobile devices in December 2009, more than doubling in just one year. 120 million more people used mobile Internet last year than in 2008, a clear sign that the mobile market is set to explode in the country. At this point, 60.8 percent of Internet users in the country also used mobile devices and 30.7 million connected exclusively with their mobile phones.
The numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, but the trend is clear, China is going online and fast. It already has the biggest online population of any one country and its growth rate makes it one of the most attractive markets in the world. With around 30 percent search market share, Google.cn was definitely reaching a lot of people in the country and would have probably contributed a significant amount of revenue to Google's bottom line. Still, the company hasn't left the country just yet and it may still reach some sort of compromise with the Chinese authorities.