China Issues Broad New Rules for Web New regulations were announced in China this week, aggregating several existing policies to ease in enforcement of rules governing online publishing. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the new regulations-jointly issued by the ministry of information technology and the publications regulator-ban companies with foreign ownership of [...]
China's Smartphone Market Market research organization IDC reported that in Q4 2015 Chinese market smartphone shipments reached 117.3 million units, up 8% YoY. The November 11 (Double Eleven) Internet shopping festival and Huawei's great performance in Q4 were the main drivers for this growth. The top 5 smartphone vendors by overall market share in 2015 were [...]
China's 668 Million Netizens The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNCC) published its 37th research report this week. The report shows that as of December 2015, China had 668 million "netizens" with internet penetration rates at 50.3%, up 2.4% over 2014. The number of mobile netizens reached 620 million in 2015. Wi-Fi coverage made a significant [...]
China's Mobile Users & Mobile Gamers According to the most updated data from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the number of telephone users in China reached 1.54 billion households by the end of December 2015, of which mobile phone users accounted for 1.3 billion households and 4G users accounted for 386.2 million households. [...]
Xiaomi's Unmet Goals Gamelook reported that at Xiaomi's internal annual company party, CEO Jun Lei announced that Xiaomi has established an "exploring lab" to do research on cutting-edge technology such as virtual reality and robots/artificial intelligence. President Bin Lin announced that shipments of Xiaomi's phones reached 70 million units this year, although in early 2015 Xiaomi [...]
CES 2016 - Chinese Smartphones Dominate CES 2016 displayed a wide range of Chinese Android phones as well as a contentious hoverboard. There was not much news reported about Chinese gaming devices however, except of course for the fact that Android phones are one of the most important gaming devices in the world these days. American [...]
Regulations for TV Set-Top Boxes in China The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) announced new regulations for TV set-top boxes including a list of 81 banned 3rd party apps. Taobao's Tmall division, which certifies that all products sold on Tmall are official and authentic, said that it will upgrade its operating [...]
Chinese Mobile Gaming Market to Benefit From Faster Replacement Rate of Smartphones Technode (via Sinocism) posted an article stating that Chinese smartphone users changed their smartphones once every 29-months in 2011, but the period has been shorted to 18 months now. Over 20% of Chinese users will update for a newer phone within one year, while [...]
Baidu Replaces Bing on Edge Browser in China Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc has struck a deal with Microsoft Corp to make Baidu.com the default home page and search engine for the US behemoth's Edge browser in China, the companies announced in Seattle on Wednesday. Clearly this deal was struck well ahead of the Seattle tech [...]
Southeast Asia's Silicon Valley Slashdot posted a story that highlights Vietnam's tech boom, something that we are following because of our continuing market research on the Southeast Asian digital games market. While Vietnam continues to have strict regulatory policies governing telecom and digital games distribution, the market is one of the most exciting to watch within [...]
