The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology responded to the "sharp drop in Chinese mobile phone users": two reasons

The Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council held a press conference to introduce the new generation of information technology to help with epidemic prevention and control, resumption of work and production, and the development of small and medium-sized enterprises. At the meeting, Han Xia, Director of the Information and Communications Administration of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that during the epidemic, various information and communication services have been widely used, actively supporting the resumption of work, production and school, and the use of communication services by all sectors of society has increased significantly.

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According to statistics, from January to February this year, the cumulative traffic of mobile Internet nationwide reached 23.5 billion GB, a year-on-year increase of 44.2%. In February, the average household mobile Internet access traffic reached 8.88 GB, a year-on-year increase of 45.5%, and also reached the highest point since December.

In response to media reports that "China's mobile phone users have plummeted", Han Xia said that after consulting three operators, preliminary analysis showed that there may be two reasons:

First, due to the impact of the epidemic, many physical channels of telecom companies were unable to operate normally in February. Although online services were opened, many users were still accustomed to going to physical business halls to handle some new account openings and other services, so the speed of new user development slowed down. In addition, some existing users were unable to resume work and production, and the demand for social and economic activities decreased, so some temporary cards were cancelled and the temporary numbers were cancelled.

Second, with the nationwide implementation of number portability and the in-depth promotion of speed increase and fee reduction, some users who originally had dual SIM cards no longer need separate data cards, and these data card users have cancelled their numbers.

Han Xia said that he believed that as economic and social activities gradually resume, the number of mobile communication users may continue to grow in the future. According to the latest data from China Telecom, the average daily number of China Telecom mobile users increased by 245,000 from March 1 to March 22, an increase of 114% over the average daily number of new users in February.