4G accounts for 41% of China’s mobile connections
China’s mobile connections have stabilised over the past year at nearly 1.3 billion, with 4G users accounting for 41 per cent of the total and 3G subscribers falling to 20 per cent of connections in Q1.

Mobile subscribers sent 55.29 billion text messages in March, averaging 1.38 per connection a day, and mobile traffic rose to 616,996TB, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Foxconn builds factory in China for Huawei handsets
Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision (also known as Foxconn) reportedly is building a factory in southwest China’s Guizhou province to produce handsets for Huawei, the third largest smartphone maker in the world.

Foxconn is the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer and a major supplier to Apple and other global brands.

APT’s user base rises 15%, loss widens
Taiwan’s Asia-Pacific Telecom (APT) reported its user base increased 15 per cent to 1.08 million in the first four months of the year, with mobile data revenue accounting for 76 per cent of service turnover.

The operator posted an aggregate pretax loss of TWD1.6 billion ($49.3 million) for the January-April period.

The operator merged with Ambit at the end of last year after the tie-up was approved by the regulator. APT launched 4G service in December 2014.

Tencent diversifies revenue stream
China’s internet giant Tencent is making progress in its social advertising business, which is allowing it to diversify its revenue stream away from online games.

Although China’s advertising industry may see challenges this year due to slower economic growth, Fitch Ratings believes Tencent should outperform the market and is well-positioned to capture the longer-term growth in social advertising, given its dominance in social networks.

The company behind the WeChat (called Weixin in China) messaging app is improving its technologies and developing new advertising formats to attract a larger share of advertising spend, and will also gradually release more advertising inventory, Fitch said.

Its online advertising revenue grew by 73 per cent year-on-year in Q1, driven mainly by a greater number of users and higher monetisation through performance-based advertising.

AWS mulls building data centres in Taiwan
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is considering setting up cloud data centres in Taiwan and has competed a feasibility study, but no decision has been made, according to DigiTimes.

AWS has 12 regional bases around the world, each consisting of two clusters of four to six data centres. This year AWS plans to add five regional bases, including one in India and one in Ningxia in northern China, AWS greater China managing director Alex Yung said.