Rise of Netizens in Asia-1,400% Growth in 10 Years

Probably one of the fastest-growing sectors in China today is the Internet industry. In fact, at the end of 2008, China had 298 million Internet users. But by the end of the second quarter in 2009, its Internet population had expanded to more than 338 million. That's a 13% increase in just six months.

And China's Internet industry has been experiencing explosive growth like this for the past 10 years…

Year	China's Internet Population
2000	22.5 million
2001	33.7 million
2002	59.1 million
2003	69 million
2004	94 million
2005	103 million
2006	137 million
2007	162 million
2008	253 million
2009 (as of June 30)	338 million

As you can see in the table above, China's Internet population jumped more than 1,400% since 2000! In addition, approximately 95% of Chinese cities and towns have access to broadband Internet, and broadband Internet users jumped by 10 million in the first six months of 2009. There are now 93.5 million broadband Internet users in China.

Considering that China has more than one billion people living inside its borders, this robust growth isn't very surprising. What's incredible, though, is despite the massive growth in China's Internet users, the Internet's penetration rate is only 25% in the country.

Much of the reason for the low penetration rate in China is due to the divide between rural and urban Internet users. In 2007, it was reported that for every 100 Chinese households, there were only 2.7 computers in rural areas. While at the same time, urban areas had 47.2 computers for every 100 households. At that time, rural areas only accounted for 37.4 million Internet users, while urban areas had 125 million netizens.

Today, the gap is closing as more and more rural Chinese use the Internet, but there's still significantly more people using the Internet in China's urban areas. At the end of June, there were 95.65 million rural Internet users and about 243 million urban netizens in China.

Overall, though, the potential for growth in China's Internet industry is incredible since about three-fourths of the country still isn't using Internet. That's creating extremely profitable opportunities for Chinese Internet companies.

But what are most Chinese using the Internet for? Well, over the years, China's web surfing habits have expanded. Probably some of the top uses of the Internet in China include domestic and global news events, social networking, entertainment (like online games) and shopping (in the first two quarters of 2009, Chinese Internet shoppers jumped by 14 million to 87.9 million).