I read the following Interfax China article by Chen Shasha: China becomes Skype's biggest market with 51 million users, yet to make profit, based on information from Skype partner TOM Online.

China Internet Statistics:

• 162 million users as of June 2007
• 122 million broadband users
• 55 million wireless internet
• 54.9% Internet users are male
• 57.9% are unmarried
• 51.2% are under 25 years old
• The majority of Internet users have at least a college diploma.
• 36.7% are students
• 25.3% are enterprise staff
• 33.9% earn more than 1500 yuan a month
• 53.6% earn more than 1500 yuan a month if student users are left out.

China Internet Cafés in 2005:

• China has 110,000 Internet cafés [Editor: anecdotal evidence suggests this number may be closer to 300k cafes if you include unregistered sites]
• more than 1 million people work in this industry
• 18.5 trillion Yuan per year spent
• 70% Internet café visitors are 18-to-30 years old
• 90% are male
• 65% unmarried
• 54% hold a college degree
• More than 70% of visitors play computer games
• 20% of China's Internet users go to Internet cafés

Like I do usually, let us assume the numbers are correct, this would mean that:

• 20% of the active Worldwide Skypers are from China
• 3.9% of the population of China are Skypers
• 5.4% of the "active" population of China are Skypers (discounting people older than 65 years, and younger than 14 years)
• 34% of Chinese Internet users are Skypers

Bear in mind that the second, third and fourth numbers above are very exaggerated.

As usual, let me correct this statement: they mean "registered user names,"not "registered users", and this isn't equal to "active users".

Reasons are:

• lost password, and therefore inaccessible user name, therefore the need to create a new user name
• testing Skype, and abandoned use of the user name
• spare user names, registered for alternative or future use (i have several!)
• the owner of the user name died (yes, this also happens!)
• the person switched to another VoIP tool
• the person registered a temporary name for a temporary past situation
• spammers also register multiple usernames to "attack" their victims

So, like always, this 51 million "users" statement is marketing exaggeration!

Jean Mercier follows the numbers on Skype Numerology.