The development and integration stage

2012

The year 2012 was a year that witnessed the explosive growth of China's mobile Internet. With the rise of smart phones, overall decline of PC sales, and the fact that the number of mobile Internet users exceeded the number of PC Internet users for the first time, the era of mobile Internet officially started. Internet officially entered into the multi-screen era. The entire mobile Internet industry was thriving, drawing in a great number of companies. The mobile application market was quite hot, but there was not yet a mobile application in dominant position in the market.

This year, the competition in the industry was fierce. The commercial activities of Internet companies often became hot topics in the society. The two price wars among e-commerce companies in this year heated up the concept of e-commerce and also accelerated the transfer of household appliance stores from offline to online. The concept of e-commerce gained more and more popularity. The market's cold reaction to the second price war marked that e-commerce consumers were starting to grow mature, and that future e-commerce companies would need to build more comprehensive competitive advantages to attract consumers. In August, Qihoo 360 entered into the search engine market. After it rapidly acquired 10 percent of the market share through acquisition and user guidance, a prolonged search engine war started, which induced a great social discussion on Internet "Robots Protocol" and search engine advertising rules.

In this year, the "Broadband China Strategy" was lifted to a more important position. The promulgation of a series of national documents clarified the objectives and tasks of the 12th Five-Year Plan period. Many cities in China gained access to fiber-to-the-home service, which significantly enhanced the users' broadband speed.

The operation of "Government Microblog" became regular. Social network became an important tool of the government to listen to public opinions and serve the people. After the birth of microblog, Internet as the ground for public opinions attracted more and more attention. By the end of 2012, a total of 170 thousand government microblogs had been opened on major platforms such as Sina Weibo, Tencent Microblog, People.cn, and Xinhuanet, up 249.51 percent as compared to the previous year. In some major incidents such as the "7.21 Beijing Rainstorm", related government microblogs were operated efficiently and became the sources of authoritative information and emergency platform in sudden events. They were highly praised by netizens. After this, government microblog started to transform from a mere information channel to a service platform.