Macao's household internet usage rate reaches 91.9 percent in 2020

MACAO -- The number of Macao's households using the internet in 2020 increased by 1,200 year-on-year to 183,500, accounting for 91.9 percent of the total households, the special administrative region's statistic service said on Friday.

The latest report from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that the number of households using fiber optic broadband connection continued to rise, up by 6.5 percent year on year to 147,800, taking up 80.5 percent of the total households using the internet.

The proportion of households using mobile broadband to access the internet grew by 0.1 percentage point year-on-year to 98.0 percent, which indicated a growing prevalence of mobile broadband usage among households, the report added.

Internet users aged 3 and above totaled 566,300, a rise of 2.2 percent year-on-year. The internet penetration rate for the population aged between 15 and 24 stood at 99.3 percent, up by 0.1 percentage point year-on-year.

Meanwhile, 73.2 percent of the population aged 55 and above used the internet, up by 4.2 percentage points. As regards frequency of using the internet, 93.6 percent of the internet users used it daily, up by 0.1 percentage point.

As for the purpose of using, most of the users used the internet for communication (95.9 percent) and online entertainment (83.9 percent), albeit year-on-year decreases of 0.2 and 1.8 percentage points respectively. On the other hand, the proportion for E-banking grew by 11.6 percentage points to 51.0 percent. The number of online shoppers increased by 17.0 percent to 145,000.

The proportion of households having computer equipment fell by 3.4 percentage points year-on-year to 72.2 percent, equivalent to 144,100 households. The computer penetration rate decreased by 2.9 percentage points to 48.9 percent.