Table of cContent
1 Introduction
In March 2010 McKinsey published an article dealing with the obsession of the Internet of the Chinese population by concluding the following statement „People in the country’s 60 largest cities spend 70 percent of their leisure time online. Seismic changes in the consumer market are likely as a result.“1
China’s Internet population increased at the end of 2012 to a total number of 564 million users compared to approximately 250 million users in 2008, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIN).2 The main reasons for this enormous growth is strongly connected with different aspects, as for instance the general growth of Gross-Domestic-Product (GDP), lower priced computers, more affordable telecom connection fees, government support to Internet usage, and low-cost entertainment aspects. This affected, that also lower income groups started to use the Internet.3 Answering to this fast development and growth of Chinas Internet population, the Internet service industry is about to increase up to 17 percentages in 2013. In the last years, the Internet service industry achieved even annual growing rates up to 20 percentages, resulting of the booming demand. The Internet market seems to be quite satisfied for the moment but even in the next years researches forecast an annual growth of approximately 10 percentages. This is due to the expansion of existing offers in the area of e-commerce and advertisement services.4 Observing the numbers, 148 million people have already experienced Internet shopping since 2010 and it is expected that 30 million people will additionally make use of it by the end of 2015.5 The Economist stated, “the future of e-commerce is China”.6 Besides the e-commerce and advertisement services also the application services became more and more important over the last years because of the introduction of smartphones and