Disruptive Telephony

China has become the first country to reach the 900 million mobile phone user milestone after amassing about 11 million mobile phone users in April alone, according to a report by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The report itself is available in Chinese. Looking at it via Google Translate did back up the numbers quoted in the article (assuming Google Translate was accurate).

By any measurement, 900 million is a staggering number of mobile phone users. TheNextWeb's article goes on to say that India is second worldwide with 811 million mobile phone users followed distantly by the US with 303 million users.

Said another way... China has almost 3 times as many mobile phone users as the US.

Consider, too, that China's population is 1.3 billion... and you have to imagine that like folks here in the US some % of people have multiple mobile phones... so there's obviously plenty of room to grow.

I found this intriguing from the article:

China’s 3G networks, which launched in 2009, are still used only by a small portion of the country’s total mobile phone populace. In April, China had a total of 67 million 3G users, which given the massive mobile subscriber base, is believed to have the potential to exceed the rest of the world.

Fascinating to see the growth there... and if you are providing services or apps to the mobile market, you obviously need to be paying attention to what is going on in China!

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