> Industrial News > News   China Has World’s Largest Phone and Internet User Base   China has built a modern telecommunication network of the world’s largest scale, complete with world’s largest user base and global leading technology and equipment, said Guohua Xi, Vice Minister of Ministry of Industry and Information, at today’s “Sunshine Green Network Seminar 2008”. China’s fixed-line phone and mobile phone users have reached 936 million, both ranking first in the world. The phone penetration rate in China has exceeded 70%. The number of China’s Internet users has also exceeded 220 million, topping the U.S. to rank the world’s first. China can provide almost all types of telecom services available for developed countries and some of them are China’s originals. Comment: China has got the world’s largest user base for mobile phone and Internet and has become the world’s second largest auto country. It will become the world’s largest navigation country sooner or later. At present, the penetration rate of embedded navigation in China is far less than 10% of that in Japan, and China’s annual sales of PND is less than 10% of West Europe. But it’s worth notice that the stock price of the world’s largest PND provider TomTom has dropped over 20% after the release of its latest quarterly report, and that Garmin has had similar suffering. Analysts feel pessimistic about the prospect of the PND market. On the contrary, wireless carriers’ navigation revenue is on the increase. Last year, the LBS and navigation revenue for America’s mobile operators was $515 million, and they are predicted to reach $13 billion by 2013. As for China, the only country in the world with more mobile phone users than internet users (300 million more), the mobile Internet users may surpass traditional Internet users by 2008. China Mobile has 390 million users, with 500 to 600 more subscribed each month. China Mobile has recently launched 3G pre-commercial services. It has also teamed up with China’s largest digital map provider AutoNavi to contribute to off-board navigation and has showed strong determination to win in the LBS industry.   Time:2008-05-09 Source:NaviForum Shanghai News Center Relative