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Facilitated by mobile Internet, network applications that tally with the operating characteristics of mobile phones further grew in 2013. As the number one Internet application, instant messaging had a continuously rising utilization rate, while microblogs and other communication-type applications had a continuously declining utilization rate. E-business applications maintained rapid development, and the size of online shoppers grew significantly. Those applications with high requirements for network traffic and user experience, such as mobile videos or games, had an upward trend of utilization rate.
Rapid development of high-traffic mobile phone applications
In 2013, the services requiring high traffic, such as videos and music on mobile phones, grew rapidly. Specifically, the users of mobile videos grew significantly. The number of users watching or downloading videos online via mobile phones was 247 million in China as of December 2013, an increase of 112 million over the end of 2012, or a growth rate of up to 83.8%. Mobile videos have risen to the fifth major application of mobile Internet. The utilization rate growth of mobile high-traffic applications is mainly attributed to the following three factors. Firstly, users have tended to use mobile phones as their Internet access devices, and the overall Internet users have a continuously lower computer utilization rate. Secondly, the basic environment of usage has improved, such as the development of smartphones and wireless networks. Finally, the Internet access cost has reduced, such as monthly package cooperation between video operators and Internet operators.
Rapid development of comprehensive platform applications based on social networking
In 2013, Internet applications such as microblogs, social networking websites, and forums had a lower utilization rate, while platform applications related to instant messaging based on social networking developed steadily. The detailed figures show that the microblog users dropped by 27.83 million, and the utilization rate dropped by 9.2 percentage points in 2013. The overall instant messaging users, however, grew to 532 million with the boost of mobile ends, up by 64.4 million over the end of 2012 and with a utilization rate of up to 86.2%, maintaining the number one position. The mobile instant messaging developed rapidly, because on the one hand, instant messaging is well integrated with mobile communication, and on the other hand, such applications as information sharing, communication, payment or even finance have been added based on social networking, greatly increasing user stickiness.
Sluggish growth of Internet game users and rapid growth of online game users via mobile phones
In 2013, the growth of Internet game users in China slowed down significantly. The game utilization rate by Internet users dropped from 59.5% in 2012 to 54.7%. The number of Internet game users was 338 million, with an increase of 2.34 million only. Different from the overall size of Internet game users, the mobile-end Internet game users grew rapidly. The number of mobile game users in China reached 215 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 75.94 million or 54.5% over the end of 2012. The sluggish growth of users in the overall industry and the rapid growth of mobile-end game users indicate that more users are shifting from the computer end to the mobile end in the game industry, and that the impact of mobile-end online games on the PC-end online games begins to emerge.
Sustained growth of online shoppers, with group buying as the highlight
Business applications continue to maintain a high development speed, which is particularly prominent in online shopping as well as the similar group buying. In 2013, the number of online shopping users in China reached 302 million, with a utilization rate of 48.9% and representing a growth of 6.0 percentage points over 2012. The number of online group buying users reached 141 million, with a utilization rate of 22.8%, up by 8.0 percentage points over 2012. With an annual growth of users by 68.9%, group buying is the most rapidly growing business application. The rapid development of business applications is closely related to the improvement of payment and logistics and the boosting of the whole environment, while the “reverse” growth of group buying online means that group buying has entered a rational development period after the savage growth.
Table 7: Utilization Rates of Internet Applications by Netizens in China, 2012 and 2013
1 Online news: No survey on online news users was made in December 2012, and the data here were collected in June 2013.
1 Travel booking is defined in this Report as booking air tickets, hotels, train tickets, and travel & vacation products via the Internet in the last six months.
The number of search engine users in China reached 490 million by the end of 2013, representing a growth of 38.56 million or 8.5% compared to the end of 2012, and the utilization rate was 79.3%.
As one of the basic services of the Internet, the search engine industry has become mature, but changes still exist in the industry: at the industry level, search engine enterprises have sped up integration among themselves, and increased their competitiveness through merger, acquisition or other means; at the enterprise level, the growth of mobile phone Internet users has resulted in more fierce competition for the mobile-end entry; at the technological level, the technologies based on such search forms as natural language, voice, images, and two dimensional codes are developing. With the whole search industry in the mature stage, the sustainable development of search engines in the future will also depend on the search result safety and user trust.
Figure 21: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Search Engines in China, 2012 and 2013
As of December 2013, China had 302 million users of online shopping, a growth of 59.87 million or 24.7% over the previous year, and the utilization rate rose from 42.9% to 48.9%.
The growth of online shoppers in 2013 is attributed to the following three factors: Firstly, e-business enterprises have shifted from being “price driven” to being “service driven” and from pure price war to service competition, improving the consumer experience of online shopping. Secondly, the optimization of the whole application environment, such as improvement of the Internet security environment and development of applications like mobile payment and price comparison search, has provided more convenient conditions for online shopping. Finally, the laws and regulations concerning online shopping are being perfected. The government sped up the legislation process for the Internet retail market in 2013. The new Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Consumers has included personal information protection and tracing responsibility concerning online shopping, which has protected the basic rights and interests of consumers during their online shopping.
Figure 22: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Online Shopping in China, 2012 and 2013
Group buying has become the most rapidly growing Internet application. The number of users of online group buying in China reached 141 million as of December 2013, a year-on-year increase of 68.9%, and the utilization rate increased to 22.8%, a year-on-year increase of 8 percentage points.
The rapid development of mobile ends has boosted the rapid growth of group buying, and the utilization rate of mobile group buying rose from 4.6% at the end of 2012 to 16.3%. The local living services, as represented by group buying, have deeply tallied with such functions as mobile phone positioning. In 2013, the group buying service was further integrated with maps, travel, information service for living, and other fields at the mobile ends, and rapidly penetrated into Internet users, and the entire industry was also developing in depth and breadth toward the offline lifestyle services.
Group buying has returned to a rational development path after undergoing an eruptive growth in the industry. On the one hand, professional group buying websites have increased their operation efficiency through product positioning and personnel optimization, including such measures as selection of high-yield products, elevation of service quality and improvement of trust, greatly increasing users' willingness to use the websites. On the other hand, e-business platforms such as online shopping and travel-booking platforms have introduced and attached importance to group buying, further boosting the development of the group buying industry, thanks to the advantages of platform enterprises in user size and trust.
Figure 23: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Group Buying in China, 2012 and 2013
The number of users of online payment in China reached 260 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 39.55 million or 17.9% annually, with the utilization rate increasing to 42.1%.
The rapid growth of China's online payment users is mainly attributed to the following three factors: Firstly, the growth of Internet users in the Internet-based business applications has directly boosted the development of online payment. Secondly, a number of platforms have introduced the payment function, expanding payment channels. Thirdly, the offline economy and online payment have been better combined, leading to the change in the way of payment by users. For example, Alipay is used to pay taxi fares.
Figure 24: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Online Payment in China, 2012 and 2013
The number of Internet users in China booking air tickets, hotel rooms, train tickets and travel itineraries on the Internet reached 181 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 69.1 million or 61.9% annually, with the utilization rate increasing to 29.3%. In 2013, the Internet users who booked train tickets, air tickets, hotels and travel itineraries online accounted for 24.6%, 12.1%, 10.2% and 6.3% respectively. The users who booked train tickets online grew the fastest by 10.6 percentage points, becoming the main contributor to the growth of online travel booking users.
Figure 25: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Online Travel Booking in China, 2012 and 2013
The growth of online travel booking users is mainly attributed to the following four factors: Firstly, it is the effect of joint work by the national economy and travel demand. Studies have shown that when the GDP per capita reaches 5,000 U. S. dollars, the tourism industry has stepped into the mature tourist economy. In 2012, China achieved a GDP per capita of more than 6,000 U. S. dollars, entering a diversified development stage featuring sightseeing, leisure and vacation. The travel booking demands of residents were fully released. Secondly, rich information on scenic spots on the travel booking websites, practicability of travel strategies provided by the media, as well as convenience of payment have greatly improved the user experience in online travel booking. Thirdly, further utilization of the Internet by users, marketing and promotion by enterprises, and a wide range of mobile applications have facilitated offline booking
users to progressively shift to online booking.
Figure 26: Utilization Rates of Online Travel Booking Services in China, 2012 and 2013
The number of instant messaging users in China reached 532 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 64.4 million or 13.8% annually, compared to the end of 2012. The utilization rate of instant messaging was 86.2%, up by 3.3 percentage points over the end of 2012 and ranking first. As one of the most fundamental applications for Internet users, instant messaging has limited space for direct creation of commercial values, and is focused more on the development of value-added services.
Figure 27: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Instant Messaging in China, 2012 and 2013
The number of China's users of blog and personal space reached 437 million as of December 2013, representing an increase of 63.59 million over the end of 2012. A total of 70.7% of the Internet users used blog and personal space, up by 4.6 percentage points compared with that at the end of 2012. Blog users in China accounted for 14.2% of the country's total Internet users by the end of 2013, a decrease of 10.6 percentage points from the end of 2012, and both the user size and user activities kept declining. According to CNNIC's China Internet Data Platform (www.cnidp.cn), the number of blog visits decreased by 27.2% from the previous year, and the total browsed web pages declined by 22.3%in the second half of 2013.
Figure 28: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Blog/Personal Space in China, 2012 and 2013
In 2013, there was a turning point in the microblog development, and both the user size and utilization rate dropped sharply. As of December 2013, the number of microblog users in China reached 281 million, representing a decrease of 27.83 million or 9.0% from the end of 2012. The utilization rate of Internet users using microblogs reached 45.5%, down by 9.2 percentage points from the end of the previous year. The microblog development is not optimistic: on the one hand, commercialization based on the marketing through social networking networks is not satisfactory with limited profitability; on the other hand, the impact of the competitors has resulted in decreased microblog users.
Figure 29: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Microblogs in China, 2012 and 2013
The number of users of social networking websites in China reached 278 million by the end of 2013, and the utilization rate was 45.0%, down by 3.8 percentage points from the end of 2012. Though users' utilization rate of social networking websites has dropped in recent years, social networking has become the basic elements of Internet applications. For example, such services as online shopping, games and videos have introduced social networking one after another to boost their development.
Figure 30: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Social Networking Websites in China, 2012 and 2013
Figure 31: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Online Games in China, 2012 and 2013
As of December 2013, China had a total of 338 million online game users, and the utilization rate dropped from 59.5% in 2012 to 54.7%. The growth of online game users was only 2.34 million compared to the previous year, showing a limited space of growth. However, different from the overall size of online game users, the mobile game users have shown a trend of rapid growth, indicating that China's users in the online game industry have further shifted to the mobile ends.
The number of online literature users in China reached 274 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 40.97 million or 17.6% over the end of 2012. The utilization rate of online literature was 44.4%, up by 3 percentage points over the end of 2012.
Gradual improvement of the development environment for online literature is attributed to the following two factors: on the one hand, more efforts have been put into copyright protection to promote healthy development of the online literature industry. The policy details of the 18th CPC Central Committee's Third Plenary Session have laid stress on protection of intellectual property rights and copyrights, and put more efforts to combat piracy against online literature, helping increase the profitability of enterprises with genuine online literature. On the other hand, people's acceptance of online literature has increased the value of online literary works and thus increased the profitability of online literature. The mode of profit making has further expanded to such industries as games, cartoons, film and television from the modes of user payment and offline publication in the early stage.
Figure 32: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Online Literature in China, 2012 and 2013
The number of online video users in China reached 428 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 56.37 million or 15.2% over the end of the previous year. The utilization rate of online videos was 69.3%, up by 3.4 percentage points over the end of the previous year.
Online video users continue to show a trend of rapid growth, which is attributed to the improvement of the following aspects: Firstly, the network construction and video devices have provided better service conditions for online videos. Secondly, online videos have richer content which then attracts more Internet users to watch videos online. Finally, the deep cooperation between online videos and traditional TV media has boosted the consumption of online videos.
In 2013, great changes took place in the online video industry in China. At the strategic level, video websites put more efforts in merger, acquisition and integration, and multi-industry, online and offline integration occurred, keeping changing the layout of the online video industry. At the product level, video enterprises not only optimized and upgraded their PC-end and mobile-end products, but also strengthened their business related to living room entertainment, and around home entertainment launched hardware products such as set-top boxes, routers and Internet TVs related to online videos, in an attempt to win the “scrabbling for the living room”. At the website content level, many video enterprises on the one hand strengthened development of self-made plays in order to reduce copyright purchase costs and minimize losses, and on the other hand bought more offline hit TV series in order to attract new customers and increase the advertising income.
Figure 33: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Online Videos in China, 2012 and 2013
In 2013, the overall mobile Internet industry in China maintained a strong momentum of development, the features of mobile terminals were further shown, and application development in the industry presented new characteristics. Specifically, communication applications were still the mainstream mobile applications, ranking first among all Chinese applications in terms of user size and utilization rate, but the users of mobile instant messaging accounted for the vast majority, and the utilization rate of microblogs, social networking websites and forums dropped to some extent. Leisure and entertainment applications developed rapidly, and the users of mobile games, videos and music grew by a large margin with a good momentum of growth. Mobile e-business applications had relatively low penetration, but the utilization rate of all applications in the field of e-commerce showed rapid growth.
Figure 34: Network Applications by Mobile Phone Netizens in China, 2012 and 2013
Mobile instant messaging maintaining rapid development, with fiercer competition among manufacturers
The number of China's users of mobile instant messaging reached 431 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 78.64 million or 22.3% over the end of 2012. The utilization rate of mobile instant messaging was 86.1%, up by 2.2 percentage points over the end of 2012.
With its service features closely combined with the mobile phone features, mobile instant messaging developed rapidly. Internal analysis shows that compared with the PC end, it is more difficult to develop small and medium-sized mobile instant messaging tools. This is because on the one hand, the limited mobile phone features have resulted in limited development of value-added services, and on the other hand, those instant messaging tools ranking among the top few have greatly increased the user stickiness through the combination of online and offline services and applications, and the platform competition barriers have been created.
Figure 35: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Instant Messaging via Mobile Phones in China, 2012 and 2013
Mobile search growing rapidly to become a focus of competition among enterprises
The number of mobile search users in China reached 365 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 73.65 million or 25.3% over the end of 2012. The utilization rate was 73.0%, up by 3.6 percentage points over the end of 2012. With the rapid growth of mobile Internet, some search behaviors of Internet users have shifted from the PC end to the mobile end.
The mobile-end search behavior of Internet users differs from the PC-end one. In terms of the search pattern, mobile search has more diversified input modes, such as voice and QR code scanning in addition to text input, and its utilization rate increases rapidly. In terms of the search content, users have greater demands for searching local information related to lifestyle services and applications at the mobile end, in addition to entertainment and reading; and mobile search has become one of the important distribution channels for applications.
Figure 36: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Online Search via Mobile Phones in China, 2012 and 2013
Mobile microblog users decreasing and users' enthusiasm dropping
As of December 2013, the number of microblog users was 196 million, representing a decrease of 5.96 million or 2.9% from the end of 2012. The utilization rate of mobile microblogs was 39.3%, down by 8.9 percentage points from the end of 2012. Because mobile-end applications have strong exclusivity of use, the rapid development of similar platform-based mobile instant messaging and the highly overlapped functions of microblogs have diverted some of the mobile microblog users.
Figure 37: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Microblogs in China via Mobile Phones, 2012 and 2013
Mobile videos growing rapidly to have become the fifth biggest application of mobile Internet
Mobile video users reached 247 million in China as of December 2013, an increase of 112 million or 83.8% over the end of 2012. The utilization rate of mobile videos by Internet users reached 49.3%, up by 17.3 percentage points over the end of 2012.
The rapid growth of mobile videos is attributed to the following three factors. Firstly, the overall Internet use behavior of Internet users is shifting toward the mobile end, and the huge size of mobile Internet users has laid a user foundation for the use of mobile videos. Secondly, the use environment of mobile videos is improving. For example, the development of smartphones, the increase of the Wi-Fi utilization rate and the launch of the 4G network in the future are all the stimulators of the mobile video growth. Finally, the great promotional efforts by video manufacturers at the client side have increased Internet users' awareness of mobile videos, attracting more Internet users to use mobile videos.
Figure 38: Users and Utilization Rates of Online Videos in China via Mobile Phones, 2012 and 2013
Mobile games achieving an eruptive growth, with user transfer speeding up
The number of mobile game users in China reached 215 million as of December 2013, representing a growth of 75.94 million or 54.5% annually over the end of 2012. The utilization rate of mobile games was 43.1%, up by 9.9 percentage points over the end of 2012.
In 2013, the mobile game users achieved an eruptive growth, thanks to a number of factors. Firstly, games are one of the primary needs in people's daily life. With the rapid popularization of smartphones and speedy construction of networks, game demands are shifting from the PC end to the mobile end. Secondly, mobile games have the strongest cashability. Therefore, games are promoted in similar mobile applications like instant messaging, social networking applications, and distribution channels, boosting the growth of mobile game users. Finally, mobile games are characterized by a low threshold of use and playtime fragmentation, supplementing PC-end games and satisfying users' needs.
Figure 39: Number of Users and Utilization Rates of Online Games via Mobile Phones in China, 2012 and 2013
Mobile business market manifesting huge potential, with a rapidly increasing utilization rate
In 2013, the huge market potential erupted in the mobile business market. Mobile shopping developed rapidly in the mobile-end business market, with a user size reaching 144 million. As a supplement to the PC-end online shopping channel, mobile shopping had a rapidly increasing user size, which is attributed to the following three factors: Firstly, mobile phones' unique functions (code scanning, photo scanning, etc.) and convenience of use have increased the decision-making efficiency of users during their shopping. Secondly, the great promotional efforts by e-business enterprises at the mobile end have boosted online shopping by mobile phone users to some extent. Thirdly, mobile phones' unique localized e-business has expanded the mobile-end shopping channels for users.
Figure 40: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Online Shopping in China via Mobile Phones, 2012 and 2013
In 2013, mobile online payment grew rapidly, with a user size of 125 million and a utilization rate of 25.1%, up by 11.9 percentage points over the end of last year. The rapid development of mobile payment is mainly attributed to the following three factors: the rapid growth of mobile phone Internet users has laid a user foundation for mobile payment; the development of mobile e-business has boosted the growth of mobile-end payment; it is a combined promotional effect of the rapid development of mobile Internet and mobile business applications as well as the active deployment by each industry-chain party related to mobile payment. New technologies such as NFC and Bluetooth keys will further boost the development of payment applications with the mobile phone as the carrier.
Figure 41: Number of Users and Utilization Rate of Mobile Payment by Netizens in China, 2012 and 2013
[1] Travel booking in this Report is defined as the booking of air tickets, hotels, train tickets, or travel itineraries in the past six months.