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Monday, October 8, 2007

China: Taking Over the Internet

Asia is already the region of the world with the greatest Internet use and this is extremely likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. In fact, Asia's share of Internet use is very likely to increase as more and more of the huge populations of China and India (1.3 billion and 1.1 billion respectively) get connected. Here are some Internet statistics that I find very interesting. Based on the numbers, it doesn't take a genius to realize that Asia, and especially China, is the place to be for many types of Internet-oriented businesses.

China is clearly the country with the greatest potential for growth. There are already 162 million people in China with Internet access (not even including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), second only to the United States' 211 million. China is almost guaranteed to overtake the U.S. within a decade or so since the percentage of the population with Internet access is still only about 13%, leaving huge room for growth. The United States is over 60% as are other highly-developed countries Japan and South Korea. China's economic growth has averaged around 10% annually for the past 10 years (the highest of any country in the world) and this is resulting in a rising percentage of the population being raised out of poverty with discretionary income to spend on things like Internet access. China curently has about 1.31 million websites which is about a 60% increase from 2006 and continues to increase rapidly.

If all this isn't impressive enough, China currently has over 600 million mobile phones which means that about one out of five mobile phone users in the world is Chinese.

Internet statistics are available on the Internet at the Internet World Statistics website.

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