By Sophia Meng: Subscribe to Sophia's RSS feed
July 15, 2010 7:01 PM EDT
The number of netizens in China, already the world's largest internet market by users , has surged to 420 million, officials said on Thursday.
The figure rose by 36 million since it was last released at the end of 2009, China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), a government-linked industry body said in the statement.
There are three factors that help drive the latest growth, including online shopping, web payment and internet bank.
The number of Chinese who shop online rose by 31 percent to 142 million, and those who conduct web payment and online banking increased by 30.5 percent and 29.1 percent respectively.
The number of users accessing the Internet via mobile phones jumped to 277 million, up 18.6 percent compared to the end of 2009. Out of them, 49.14 million users use mobile phones only to access the internet, accounting for 11.7 percent of the total population of Chinese netizens. This is helped by the fast expansion of the country's third-generation (3G) network.
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Since more and more netizens are using the internet for business purposes, "the mobile internet shows enormous potentials," the statement said.
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