MIIT Shares China's October Numbers: Internet Gets More Mobile, Land Line Phones Dying

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has just released statistics on the state and growth of China's tech sector as of the end of October. Over the course of the month, users nationwide spent more than 1 trillion RMB ($158 billion) on telecom services. Profits are up across the board, and the only real loser looks to be land-line phones, which lost nearly 1.6 million subscribers over October even as mobile phones gained an additional ten million users.

Of course, the demise of land-line phones should come as no surprise, but the October data shows that consumers are abandoning wired phones with accelerating speed. Mobile growth has been more steady, but no less impressive: China has already added more than 100 million new mobile subscribers this year. That includes 83 million new 3G users, for a total of more than 212 million 3G subscribers.

Unsurprisingly, broadband connections are have increased by quite a bit, with more than 22 million added this year as of October's end. MIIT's data also shows that mobile internet users have grown dramatically, adding 116 million new users this year, although it's not too clear exactly how MIIT defines those users.

If you love numbers, there are more in this China News Service piece on MIIT's report, but if you've been following this blog at all over the past year, you're probably not going to find anything that surprises you. Broadband connections are growing, but mobile internet is king, and that's a trend that doesn't seem likely to reverse itself anytime soon.

[China News Service via Sina Tech]