Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

This post is not related to elearning nor technology, but relevant to the local community. A recent study conducted by "worldjournal", a Chinese media company in Canada indicates among the top ten surnames in the Greater Vancouver community, the top three of them are common Chinese surnames. Although the first one "LEE" is shared among various of ethnic groups (British, Chinese and Korean). The second and third most popular surnames are: "Wong" and "Chan".

According to the report, "Smith" was top surname in the Greater Vancouver area before 1991 but slipped to number 4 this year. However it is still the number one surname in Canada.

The other six most popular surnames in Vancouver are: "Kim", "Chen", "Gill", "Li", "Brown" and "Johnson".

Note that there are two types of Chinese today - Simplified and Traditional. Their spellings in English (pinyin) are slightly different due to pronunciation alterations. For example, "Wong" and "Wang" is the same surname; "Lee" and "Li" is the same surname. Normally people from Hong Kong and Taiwan are using the first set - "Wong" or "Lee", people from mainland China are using the second set - "Wang" or "Li" etc.

Therefore, this blog can also be called "Tim Wong's eLearning Blog". :)

A recent report has been generated by the Chinese Media Research Lab. The study indicates the New Media related market is generating 114 billion Yuan (16.3 billion Canadian dollars). The top two marketing growth belong to Mobile Media and Web Media. The Chinese Mobile Media industry alone in 2006 has generated 88.8 billion Yuan (12.7 billion Canadian dollars), a nearly 41.3% growth! Mobile Media industry covers mobile TV, mobile MP3, SMS, and Mobile Gaming. The Chinese Web Media industry generated 252 billion Yuan in profit, which covers Online Gaming, Online Advertisement, Online TV, and Self Publishing (blog, wiki etc...). Among this, there is a 62% growth in online gaming and 48.2% growth in online advertisement.

The director of the research lab Wang Liming is excited about the figures. He says, "China's GDP per capital has exceeded 1000 US dollar. According to statistics and studies, when GDP per capital falls between 1000 to 10000 US dollars, there's a surge in media growth. This means New Media industries in China has a huge potential ahead of itself..."

.CN domain names is the most registered domain extensions in Asia. It has exceeded the other regional domain names such as .jp (Japan), .kp (Korea), .sg (Singapore). By the end of the year 2005, there were 1.1 million domain names with .cn suffix, an 154% increase over the year 2004. It also has jumped to the 6th most registered suffixes internationally. The majority of the registered web sites in China are commercial web sites (60%), personal web sites (22%), education web sites (5.1%) and government web sites (4.4%).

China Mobile published their 2005 financial report today. They pocketed 53.55 billion RMB (CAD $7.9 billion) in the year 2005, an 28% increase compare to the previous year. SMS (Short Message Service) alone gained 24.67 billion RMB (CAD $3.63 billion) in the Chinese mobile communication market. Ringing Tone download service and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) are the other two major profitable services offered by China Mobile.

According to my experience, SMS is way more popular in China than here in Canada. Maybe this is due to the "cheaper" telephone rate and "fancy" mobile service plans we have here.

The world's biggest mobile phone market, China just reached 400 million cell phone users according to a number published by the government yesterday. (Ministry of Information Industry)

The first mobile phone network in China was launched in 1987. It took this market 10 years to reach to 10 million consumers. The number of mobile phones in China surpassed the number of residential phones in the year 2003.

There were 33.8 billion text messages in January, compare to last year's figure, there is a 65.7% increase!

According to a recent report (published by Guang Ming Daily) on 2005 Chinese Gaming Industry, there are over 10,000,000 registered students playing online games on a daily basis. There are total of 26.34 million online gamers in China and 38.9% of them are registered students.

The majority age group of the total online players is between 16 to 30. 33.3% of them (8.77 million) are between 19 to 22, 28.4% (7.48 million) of them are between 22 to 25.

According to a new statistics from ACNielsen, 63% Chinese internet surfers shops online. This means there are over 63 million buyers online in China (over 100 million internet users in China). Read this post to get the updated information on internet users in China. In the study, the number indicates the most popular item in the online shopping industry are books (56% of Chinese online shoppers buy books); the second most popular item is Entertainment contents delivered via DVD, CD and online gaming (24% of Chinese online shoppers buy DVD, VCD and online games); the third most popular items are music CDs and clothing (23% of Chinese online shoppers buy music contents, cloths, shoes and hats). This trend is somewhat similar to the American online shopping developments over the last few years. (Especially when Amazon and eBay just took off)

However, there is one huge difference between the online shopping behaviors between US and China: over 34% of online shoppers pay upon receiving the product they selected; 31% uses fund transfer via online banking; only 26% Chinese online shoppers use credit cards.

The majority of the shoppers are university students. My guess is that wait till this generation graduate and earning a stable salary. Their online shopping budget will be increased gradually. Plus the rest of the Chinese population (92.1% of 1.4 billion) slowly understand this concept, China is going to have the largest online shopping community in the world.

Qian Mao, director of the Chinese Fiber Optical Communication Consortium recently revealed some new numbers of the high speed Internet usages in China. According to Mr. Mao, according to the data collected till end of June 2005, there are 103 million Internet users. Among them, there are 53 million high speed Internet users. The rest 50 million are using dial up Internet access. There are over 67% of the high speed Internet users use ADSL technology, which is approximately 33 million accounts. However, many users are not satisfied at the speed of the ADSL services. According to Mr. Mao's number, 5% of the high speed Internet users are not satisfied with the surfing speed, 17% of them are less favor and 40% feels acceptable but not great. My expectation is that the Chinese ISPs will boost the speed dramatically within the next 2 years to accommodate the growing VOIP industry and media deliver services. China has the largest high speed Internet service market in the world, but the government is still very much regulating who can provide these services. The room to grow in this industry is much bigger than other Asian countries such as Korea or Singarpore.

A recent study "2005 Internet Usage and It's Influence over 5 Chinese Cities" indicates the Chinese internet surfers spend an average of 2.73 hours on the World Wide Web each day. This is approaching to the figure 3.0 hours per surfer per day in the US (Data were collected from a representative sample of 4,839 American respondents between the ages of 18 and 64 in June 2004).

What’s more interesting from the report is that the study finds that near 50% of the online users use instant messaging software for work purposes from time to time. The reasons behind this include: “easier and faster than Fax and Email”, “The installation process of the software is much simpler than installing a telephone line”, “it’s much cheaper using chat since phone usages are charged per minutes even for in-city calls in China”…

The instant messaging software Chinese normally use are: QQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger. There are fewer users on iChat (less Mac users in China in general) and AOL. The amount of VOIP usage over the messaging systems has exponentially increased over the last six months.

A new statistics from Xinhua.net indicates in the past 8 months, there have been over 190.6 billion text messages being transferred over the Chinese mobile SMS! Chinese mobile communication companies charge 0.1 yuan (1.5 cents in CAD) per message, this means there has been over 19 billion yuan (2.8 billion dollars in CAD) in profit being made on short messages alone! According to this number, the total amount of messages using Mobile SMS will easily proceed last year's record (220 billion messages). There are currently 3700 million mobile phone users, approximately 28 phones every 100 Chinese.

According to the recent report from IDC (IDC.com), the IT demand in the education industry will be much higher (14.3%) than the IT demands in other areas. The CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of the IT expenditures in the education industry will be a steady growth of 15% annually. By the year 2009, the estimated marketing value of Educational IT industry will reach 4.4093 billion US dollars. This value includes computer hardware, software, network infrastructure, servers, database etc...

An interesting observation I have had in regard to the current Chinese educational IT industry is that the hardware infrastructure is quite advanced in schools. However, there is a high demand in the software, content and service areas. The fiber optical cables have been laid out quite nicely between the education institutes. But many networks are lack of quality online learning content. The market is highly profit driven instead of the learners' demands.

Following up the article on Jan 23rd, 2005 “Newest statistics on the Internet Usage in China 2004”, a new estimate on the number of internet users in mainland China in 2005 will exceed 120 million which is still behind the number in the US (180 million). However, this is a very conservative estimate. The average speed of the commercial internet will be boosted along with CERNET2 being deployed among public education institutions.

Just read an up-to-date marketing report on Chinese IT training industry. The report is written in Chinese, here is my translation:

Summary on Chinese IT Training and Education 2004

Chinese IT training and education market generated 3.35 billion Yuan in sales (approximately 558 million Canadian dollars) in the year 2004, a 16.3% increase over 2003.

Marketing Structure
From product and service point of view, basic IT training (28.7%) and internet application training (22.7%) played two important roles in the market, them together generated over 50% of the total profit. The other IT training sectors that worth to mention are: software development training (14.7%), database administration (11.1%), operating systems and desktop publishing (18.2%).

Vertical Analysis:
Corporate training continuously to be the main form of demand in this market, it converts over 75% of the total IT training marketing profit. There was an obvious increase in demand from the enterprise and government in the previous year. Here is the break down list based on profit based on the demands from the year 2003 to 2004: Education (50 million RMB, 8.7%), Government (261, 24.9%), Family/Home/Residential (510, 6.5%), large size enterprise (1530, 19.5%), medium size enterprise (849, 16.4%), small size enterprise (150, 9.5%), total 3.35 billion RMB.

Parallel Analysis:
Communication, Finance, Energy and Manufacture are four major sectors in the IT training industry. Here is the break down list based on industrial demands: Communication (610 million RMB, 21.8% increase), Construction (6, 0.0%), Transportation (280, 6.9%), Education (50, 8.7%), Finance (567, 20.1%), Research (30, 7.1%), Mobilization (210, 2.4%), Media (290, 3.6%), Energy (420, 18.0%), Health (250, 8.7%), Dawk (420, 5.0%), Government (260, 24.9%), Manufacture (420, 21.4%) and Others (400, 11.7%), total 3.35 billion RMB.

Geographic Analysis:
Central China continuously had the largest on IT training over other areas in China. However, North West regions are catching up. North East and South West are slowing down.

Brand Names:
Top five IT training co-operations: Beijing University APTECH, NIIT, Chinese Academy of Science Software Training Centre, ATEC and DigitalChina. These five companies control over 40% of the IT training market in China.

One of the biggest in the IT training industry is the web based training is replacing face-to-face training. This trend will continue it's momentum in the year 2005. The original Chinese document is located here:

http://www.chinabyte.com/busnews
/216486142927699968/20050304/1918267.shtml#

You think you had a hard time finding a job? Take a look at these pictures! Over 100,000 job hunters showed for the largest job convention in Beijing on Feb. 25th, 2005. According to the news article, most of the candidates have college or higher education background.

According to the newest statistics, there were over 275,880,000 text messages generated across the Shanghai mobile network on the Chinese New Year's eve (Feb. 8th). This number indicates the mobile communication service providers in Shanghai made over 30 million RMB (5 million CAD$) in cash just over instant messaging in one night! (Senders pay 10 cents per message in China.)

Xinhua news net indicates the total amount of text messages over mobile devices in China within the 7 days of new years holiday should reach 10 billion! The amount of text messages transmitted over the cell phones in the year 2004 is 217.7 billion, an increase of 21700% over the past 5 years. (Yes, 217 times more than the year 2000) The statistics also indicates in the year 2005, the amount of mobile phone users in China should reach 450 million, a new "Virtual Market on Thumbs" is being initiated in China.

CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) just released their newest survey result on the newest Internet Development in China. Total internet users in China exceeded 94 million by the end of 2004, about one half of the amount of internet users in the U.S. (180 million). Among them, the number of broadband users was 42.80 million. In the mean time, the number of computer hosts in China has raised to 41.60 million, an increase of 14.6% over the past 6 months. The numbers of domain names and websites registered under .CN were 432077 and 668900, increasing by 50000 and 43000 respectively, compared with the figures of 6 months ago. The bandwidth of international connection has reached 74429M; the total number of IPv4 addresses allocated to China has been 59945728, presenting a half-year growth of 38 percent and 21 percent respectively.

In additional to this, CNNIC also studied the diversity of the usage. The studies shows the information concerned by the netizens was no longer just focused on news. The figures from the report unveil the following results: as for the information that was mostly inquired, 29.3% users believed educational information was the mostly inquired information, 13.8% took automobile info and 24.2% considered recruitment info; as for the Internet services, the following Internet services or functions are still developing rapidly: Email, search engine, online banking, online trading, online advertisements, news, Internet games, among which, Email is still one of the most concerned Internet applications. The satisfactory degrees of the users for charged email and free email are 32.6% and 71.9% respectively.

The report tells that the primary reasons for non-Internet users not to access the Internet are that they do not know how to use computer/Internet (40.1%) and that there is no facility to access the Internet (23.1%). The level of the development of education and economy is still the main factor to limit the improvement of Internet. Thus, to facilitate the enhancement of the Internet in China, the promotion of the fundamental knowledge of Internet must be intensified and the local economy be greatly developed. (CNNIC "15th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China")