In the first half of the year, telecommunications revenue increased by 8.9 percent year on year, and the number of 3G users reached 319 million, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on July 24.

From January to May, the information consumption scaled up to 1.38 trillion yuan ($224.9 billion), up by 19.8 percent year on year. The number of WeChat users exceeded 400 million, driving the revenue growth from mobile traffic up by 56.8 percent, said Zhu Hongren, chief engineer of the MIIT.

WeChat is a text and voice message app of the Chinese technology company Tencent.

In the first half this year, the market scale of the e-commerce industry reached 5.4 trillion yuan ($880.04 billion), surging 38.5 percent. Sales volumes of smart phones and TVs both went up by more than 25 percent. The investment in telecommunications infrastructure was 129.7 billion yuan ($21.14 billion).