BEIJING-China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) released mobile subscriber statistics for the first half of the year. At the end of June, China had 176.16 million mobile-phone users.
The number of subscribers increased by 4.78 million in June, a bit slower than the average monthly subscriber growth in the first half of the year of 5.22 million. China added 31.35 million mobile-phone users in the first half. The penetration rate now stands at 13.86 percent.
Users of China Mobile’s network sent 28.2 billion short messages in the first half, more than the 15.8 billion in the whole of last year. Revenue from short message service (SMS) messages could help underpin average revenue per user, which is falling.
China had 198.94 million fixed-line users at the end of June, 11.12 percent more than at the beginning of the year. The number of paging subscribers fell 10.98 million to 25.07 million.
