China has nearly 1 billion internet users

China announced that it has nearly 1 billion internet users. This new data showed the extent to which Chinese people went online in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and adopted new habits, such as shopping through video live streams.

By the end of 2020, China had 989 million internet users since more people were spending time indoors due to the pandemic. This is way higher than Nigeria.

According to CNBC, between March and the end of the year, 72.15 million more people were shopping online, predominantly on mobile phones, reaching 782 million in China.

Internet users in China with a monthly income of at least 5,001 yuan ($774) rose to 29.3% in December, up from 27.6% in March.

The number of people working from home also increased from 147 million from June to 346 million as of December.

With the rise of video streaming apps like Tiktok, more people watched short videos than shop online in China. The number of video watching rose from 76.33 million over nine months — to 927 million in December.

What you should know:

• In 2020, Nigeria had 99.05 million internet users with almost three-quarters of Nigerian web traffic being generated via smartphones.
• Nigeria is considered a mobile-first market and it is projected to grow to 131.7 million internet users in 2023. The internet penetration in Nigeria amounted to 46.6 percent of the population in 2020 and is set to reach 65.2 per cent in 2025.
• In a country with over 200 million people, only around 10 to 20 percent of the population use a smartphone.
  Majority of mobile users are still using feature phones which offer basic phone functions like voice calling and text messaging.