Today, at the closing ceremony of the 2019 (18th) China Internet Conference, the China Internet Society released the “China Internet Development Report (2019)”. The report shows that by the end of 2018, the number of Internet users in China reached 829 million. The number of internet users increased by 56.63 million for the whole year. The Internet penetration rate reached 59.6%, an increase of 3.8 percentage points from the end of 2017, exceeding the global average by 2.6 percentage points.
According to the report, as of the end of 2018, the number of websites was 5.23 million, down 1.9% from the end of 2017.
In 2018, the total shipment volume of China’s smartphone market was 414 million units, down 15.6% year-on-year, a decrease of 3.4 percentage points from the previous year. However, 764 new models listed, down 27.5% year-on-year.
In 2018, China’s mobile Internet market reached 11.39 trillion yuan ($1.66 trillion), of which mobile shopping dominated with a scale of 8.85 trillion yuan ($1.29 trillion). The size of China’s online game market is about 287.1 billion yuan ($41.79 billion, including the mobile game market size of 164.7 billion yuan ($23.97 billion). The overall market size of e-sports is about 94.05 billion yuan ($13.69 billion). And the PC online game market is 5.06 billion yuan ($0.74 billion), an increase of 21.9%. The growth rate has slowed down compared to 2017.
In 2018, the scale of domestic investment and financing showed rapid growth. There were 2,685 investment and financing cases, an increase of 107.2% compared with 1,296 in 2017. The total transaction amount was $69.7 billion, 43.8% up from $48.48 billion in 2017.