Weibo has been one of the indispensable mobile apps among China internet users with the popularity of smartphones. Weibo conducted a survey on smartphone development involving 100 million active smart device logging in Weibo in Q4 2014. More devices used logging in Weibo are China’s domestic brands. Among top 10 new smart device on Weibo in Q4 2014, domestic brands accounted for 85%.
In Q4 2014, among the new smartphones used Weibo app, high-end smartphone (>RMB3,000) accounted for 37.1% while smartphones between RMB1,200 and 2,999 accounted for 36.7% which indicates a large percentage of high-income users on Weibo.
In terms of Weibo’s monthly active users’ smartphone brands, Apple ranked top, representing 34.4%, followed by Samsung and Xiaomi.
As the rise of domestic smartphone brands in China, such brands accounted for about 60% of all brands used by Weibo users in Q4 2014. See Xiaomi’s perforance in 2014: Xiaomi Beat Samsung As Top Smartphone Vendor in 2014
Previous Weibo iPhone users who still use iPhone accounted for 71.7% which indicates iPhone’s user stickiness is really strong in China. Apple’s iOS reached its highest ever share in urban China with one in every four smartphones (25.4%) sold being an iPhone for the three months ending in January 2015.
36.2% previous Weibo Android smartphone users changed to iPhones in Q4 2014 in China.
Various Android smartphones are facing great challenges as Weibo users mainly changed their brands to iPhone in Q4 2014 in China. iPhone’s retention was 71.7%, ranking top, followed by Xiaomi and Vivo in Q4.
As the data showing above, among the top 10 mobile app stores by total number of Weibo app downloads, 5 of them were smartphone vendors’ mobile app stores with Xiaomi app store ranking top in Q4 2014.
Hu Yanping, the founder of DCCI internet data center said that mobile Weibo users exceeded 80% which means Weibo has been a mobile internet product. Weibo has great value in marketing as well as smartphone market development.
Also read: Profile of China B2C E-C Weibo Accounts Users in 2014
