By Xinhua
Guangzhou (China) : The number of mobile phone users in China has crossed the 600-million mark, which means that one in five mobile phone users in the world is Chinese, a senior official said Sunday.
The number included 80 million personal handy phone (PHS) users, said Xie Feibo, vice director of the Radio Administration Bureau of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) at a forum on Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises held in Guangzhou of south China’s Guangdong province.
Official figures showed that the nation’s mobile phone users increased by 40.56 million from the end of last year, 6.76 million a month on average.
Meanwhile, fixed-phone users had only grown by 4.86 million to 372 million users.
In 1987, when China introduced its first mobile telecommunications equipment, there were little more than 700 users. In 2001, its mobile phone users passed the 100-million mark, the largest in the world, and the figure touched 400 million in January 2006.
The trend shows no signs of stopping as a vast rural and urban market continues its hunger for more media-rich and web accessible handsets.