Tencent Holdings Ltd’s (騰訊) messaging services were by far the most popular Chinese mobile apps last year, leading steady growth in the world’s largest Internet and smartphone market, the Chinese government’s online industry overseers said yesterday.
WeChat (微信) remained the most heavily used app in the country last year, with almost 80 percent of the online population employing the social media service frequently, the China Internet Network Information Center or CNNIC said in its annual report.
Tencent’s QQ took second place, while Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s (阿里巴巴) online bazaar Taobao (淘寶) came in third. Baidu Inc’s (百度) mobile app and Alipay (支付寶), the payments service run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial Services Group (螞蟻金服), rounded out the top five.
The rankings underscore how China’s “BAT” Internet triumvirate — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — dominate the country’s Internet industry, which is walled off from the likes of Google, Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc. Internet users there climbed about 6 percent to 731 million — about twice the population of the US.
The number of people who accessed the Internet through a mobile device surged more than 12 percent to 695 million.
China has become a major source of revenue for smartphone industry players from Qualcomm Inc to Apple Inc, which now counts the greater China region as its biggest international market, but the domestic scene is again lorded over by a clutch of local players, including Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀移動), Vivo Communication Technology Co Ltd (維沃移動通信) and Huawei Technologies Co (華為).
One of the fastest-growing areas last year was ride-hailing, according to the CNNIC. That segment is dominated by Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行), which drove Uber Technologies Inc out of the market last year when it bought the San Francisco start-up’s local operation.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
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GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by