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From...
China Internet market on the rise
September 4, 1998
Web posted at: 11:45 AM EDT
by Kathleen Ohlson
(IDG) -- The number of registered Internet users in China is on the rise, earlier this year doubling to 1.175 million in six months, according to statistics released today by Information Gatekeepers, Inc.
Internet users in China tallied 620,000 by the end of 1997 and increased twofold by the end of this June, the company said. That number is expected to rise to 2 million by the end of 1998 and will be at 6 million to 7 million by 2000, said Hui Pan, chief economist at IGI.
Registered users, those that have an account with a Chinese ISP, are mostly logging on to the Web (82.2 percent), followed by e-mail (9.1 percent), file transfer (7.2 percent) and Telnet (0.8 percent), according to the research.
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Competition among ISPs in China is leading to lower prices, allowing more users to jump onto the Internet, according to Pan. China Telecom and Ji Tong Communications are lowering the prices that their ISPs, ChinaNet and China GBN (Golden Bridge Network), respectively, charge for Internet access.
Meanwhile, Unicom-Sparkice, a joint venture between China Unicom and Sparkice, is getting into the ISP picture. The venture is expected to have 25 percent of the commercial ISP market in China after a merger between Unicom-Sparkice and Info Highway, another Chinese ISP, is approved, IGI quotes Edward Zeng, chief executive officer of Unicom-Sparkice, as saying.
The venture has opened six Internet cafes in Beijing and plans to introduce 100 more throughout China, IGI said. Unicom-Sparkice is also constructing ChinaRep, an English/Chinese electronic commerce site that will provide company and product information, home-page design services, Chinese/English translation and secretarial services, and access to Dragon Pulse, a list of about one million Chinese firms.
Unicom-Sparkice has been given a license by China Unicom to provide Internet telephony, fax and backbone services, IGI said. The telephony service is expected to cost US$0.10 per minute from China to the U.S.
Unicom-Sparkice also was awarded an electronic commerce banking license from the Bank of China to offer online banking via the Internet.
The market is also growing as more Chinese-language Web sites appear, enabling non-English speaking users to log on, Pan said. He believes the most important factor for these sites will be China Telecom's countrywide intranet. The language-barrier is a major hurdle and this network will ease it, Pan said.
The increase in Internet usage in China is also attributed to a rise in its use by young, educated Chinese who speak English, as well as the popularity of PCs, Pan said.
China currently has an international gateway of 85M bits per second bandwidth that connects to the global Internet and has direct links to the U.S., Germany, France, Japan and Hong Kong, IGI said.
Information Gatekeepers publishes various information on telecommunications topics, documents on standards, government reports, trade directories and conference proceedings.
Kathleen Ohlson writes for the IDG News Service in Boston.