China passes 400 million mobile phone user mark
China continues to outpace India with blistering pace of mobile phone growth
Follow @infoworldThe number of mobile phone users in China has passed the 400 million mark, the government said Thursday, but it won't have specific figures available until it issues its February totals next month.
Chinese users continue to sign up for mobile phone service at a blistering pace. The nation added 5.37 million new users in January, for an official total of 398.8 million subscribers as of the end of last month, according to the Ministry of Information Industry. The figures also show that China continues to outpace India, which has claimed its mobile phone growth now matches China.
Simple messages have also become more popular among users in China, as they sent 33.72 million short text messages to one another last month, up 66 percent over the same month in 2005, according to the ministry.
Cellular phone users actually outnumber fixed line subscribers by a widening margin now in China, with fixed line totals at 352.99 million at the end of January.
India added 4.69 million new mobile phone users in January, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, continuing its brisk growth. In December, 4.46 million new subscribers signed up in the nation, showing the monthly pace more than doubled from just six months earlier, when the June figure totalled 1.98 million.
There were 80.61 million mobile phone subscribers in India as of the end of January, the authority said, and 49.21 million fixed line phone users.
Both countries boast populations of over 1 billion people.
China Mobile, the world's largest mobile phone service provider, added 4.07 million subscribers in January, bringing its total to 250.7 million handset users, according to the company's Web site.
