SHANGHAI - China has surpassed the United States to become the market with the highest number of Internet users, research company BDA said Thursday.
The Beijing-based research company said it reached the estimate by analyzing China Internet Network Information Center data indicating that China had 210 million Internet users at the end of 2007. Nielsen/NetRatings estimated that the United States' Web population was 216 million at that time, BDA said.
"Based on these sources and the assumption that these markets have continued to grow in 2008 to date at the same rates that they grew in 2007, we can conclude that China has by now comfortably surpassed the United States as the world's largest Internet population," analyst Bin Liu said.
BDA said it expects e-commerce to become the next boom sector in China as businesses take advantage of the mass market of consumers already online.
