M:Metrics Now Measuring China, the World’s Largest Mobile Market
That’s the headline accompanied with an email I received from M: Metrics today.
Enclosed was this interesting grid consisting of mobile feature consumption based on a sampling of consumers in six countries and so I copied the data into a spreadsheet to see some of the numbers on my own and the reality is that while China is the world’s largest market due to sheer population, they’re not the largest consumer of mobile media by a long shot. In fact they’re only leading in Listening to music.
Of the consumers in the six Countries sampled, China is seemingly lagging far behind the leading Countries in other common usage areas. Oh, and for some reason… perhaps the Great Firewall of China? Watching Video barely registers a blip on the radar. The other puzzling feature not being used in China is mobile email. On average the 6 Countries measured are averaging 9.3% email usage. Yet China is less than 3%.
Copyright © 2008, M:Metrics, Inc.
Here’s the explanation on the source data:
Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2008. Survey of mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending 30th November 2007, mobile subscribers in France, n = 12,867 Germany, n = 15,700; Italy, n = 13,107; Spain, n = 12,877; United Kingdom, n = 15,588; United States, n = 33,237, and the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Chengdu, Wuhan and Xi’an for the three-month average ending 31 December 2007 n=5,163.
It’s hard to say way so few Chinese mobile users were surveyed, there’s just no explanation for that in M:Metrics’ email to me. You can snag the full report here (pdf format).
