China's Mobile Apps Exceed 4.02 Million as Games Lead the Market

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently released its report on China's internet business operations in the first half of 2017. The reporter noted that revenue from e-commerce platforms grew by 42.9% year on year, while China's mobile application(App) market remained active, with the number of mobile internet applications exceeding 4.02 million.

Internet access revenue falls by nearly 40% year on year

The report shows that from January to June, China's internet and related services enterprises above the designated size threshold (referred to as internet enterprises) generated revenue of RMB 284.3 billion, up 24.9% year on year.

From January to June, internet enterprises generated RMB 4.2 billion in internet data centre revenue, down 9.3% year on year. By the end of June, the number of servers deployed had reached 1.03 million, up 31.5% year on year. Internet access revenue totalled RMB 7.73 billion from January to June, down 37.6% year on year. Information services revenue reached RMB 260 billion over the same period, up 38.7% year on year and accounting for 91.5% of total business revenue.

E-commerce platform revenue grows by more than 40% year on year

The figures show that within information services revenue, online games (including client-based games, mobile games, browser games and others) generated RMB 67.7 billion, up 28.8% year on year, while e-commerce platform revenue reached RMB 107.4 billion, up 42.9%. The structure of the e-commerce market remained largely stable. Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai had large numbers of e-commerce enterprises operating at considerable scale and together accounted for nearly 80% of e-commerce platform revenue.

Policies including the Broadband China strategy and pilot programmes to open up the broadband access market continued to encourage private capital to enter the market and expand investment, while subscriber numbers grew steadily. By the end of June, internet enterprises had a total of 37.52 million broadband access subscribers, up 35.2% year on year.

Gaming applications dominate the app market

The report shows that the number of mobile internet applications in the Chinese market had exceeded 4.02 million. In June, China's third-party app stores and Apple's app store added 120,000 new mobile applications (apps). By the end of June, China's domestic third-party app stores offered more than 2.32 million mobile applications, while the Apple app store in China offered more than 1.71 million. Distribution through third-party app stores exceeded 627.7 billion downloads.

Among application categories attracting market interest, smart logistics applications—including logistics companies' applications, freight transport service applications and online shopping platforms with their own logistics capabilities—numbered more than 13,000. Online payment applications offering financial payment functions such as QR code scanning and money transfers numbered more than 9,000.

By the end of June, gaming was the largest application category, with 1.167 million apps. Lifestyle services ranked second, with more than 528,000 apps, followed by e-commerce in third place with 421,000. Office and learning applications increased slightly to 320,000, ranking fourth. Sports and health applications and everyday utility applications followed, with 216,000 and 157,000 respectively. Among the other categories, news and reading applications and audio and video playback applications declined slightly compared with May, while all remaining categories maintained steady growth.

In terms of downloads, system utilities, games, and audio and video playback applications remained the top three categories, recording 119.48 billion, 118.34 billion and 79.78 billion downloads respectively. Together, these three categories accounted for more than 50% of all downloads.

 

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