A recently released Shenzhen Internet Development Research Report demonstrates that, Internet penetration in Shenzhen reached 76.8% and there are 7.97 million netizens there. This penetration rate is quite close with that of Japan, whose penetration is the highest in the world.
The internet penetrations of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are 70.3%, 66.2% and 72.9%, respectively. As for the international cities, Hong Kong’s Internet penetration is 68.7% and Singapore is 77.2% based on the statistics from Internetworldstats.com. Judged on the penetration rate, Shenzhen has surpassed Hong Kong and is getting closer to Singapore.
Total number of Shenzhen netizens has increased from 1.93 million in 2008 to 5.79 million in 2012. And the mobile Internet penetration is 72.6%, 3 percentage points higher than the national average. Among those everyday Internet-surfers, 24% will spend more than 4 hours every day.
Liu Bing, vice-president of China Internet Information Center, said that Shenzhen’s netizens infrastructure is better than most cities in China. Netizens between 20 to 40 year-old account for approximately 60%. Take a closer look on these young netizens, student groups are comparatively smaller while on-job groups are bigger. Netizens’ education level is higher than the national average.
It is worth mentioning that Shenzhen has the highest weibo penetration rate in China, which is 58.6% and 10 percentage points ahead of the national average. At the same time, Shenzhen weibo users are more active. The ratio of netizens who use weibo 3 times per day is 16 percentage points higher than the average. Weibo users that spent more than 2 hours per day account for 35.3%.
Except for performance on weibo, Shenzhen netizens are also more active on SNS, blogs, BBS and online videos compared with netizens in other first-tier cities. So do they in the field of online apps like group deal, online travel booking and online stocks:
- 23.2% of them are using group deal
- 42.8% are using online banks
- 46.5% are using online payment.
Only in online literature and gaming categoires, Shenzhen’s penetration rate is lower than the average. It seems that Shenzhen netizens are more concerned on business affairs than on entertainment.
