PC World magazine reported today that China has more internet users than the U.S. has people. They also say that more Chinese than ever before are embracing e-commerce, and accessing the web via mobile phones. Let’s look at the stats:
China reportedly had 338 million Internet users at the end of last month. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 07/17/09 at 10:20 GMT (EST+5) was 306,934,130. So that part seems correct.
China’s population is currently 1,334,780,084, or 1.3 billion, according to the China Population Information and Research Center. So that means that their internet users are only about 25% of their population.
But according to Nielsen, the U.S. has 234,275,000 Internet users as of June 2009, which is about 76% of the population, so maybe the U.S. isn’t lagging behind after all.
Where they have us, as many nations do, is in broadband penetration. PC World reports that nearly all Chinese Internet users have broadband. But as you probably know, the United States, the country where the Internet was invented, is ranked 15th (or below, as we reported in an earlier post) in the world in high-speed Internet penetration.
Of course, we shouldn’t feel too bad. The Chinese also are ahead of the U.S. in the number of malware and other security problems. PC World reports that over 100 million Chinese people had their passwords or account numbers stolen this year, and almost twice as many experienced virus or trojan attacks, it said.
Tags: High Speed Internet