YugaTech | Philippines, Tech Reviews Blog

According to a friend of mine, ACNielsen doesn’t have any relevant internet-usage research studies in the Philippines. This is the same topic I brought up during the iBlog3 — no extensive public study has been made in recent years about internet penetration and online usage behavior in the country.

So, when the issue of Internet Usage in the Philippines was tackled, everyone had their own numbers to throw out. Some would say 20% while others maintain the slow growth rate of 12%. While digging a little deeper into this topic, I found several statistics and research studies from the Internet World Stats and here are some of the figures I found there:

Philippines estimated population: 87,236,532 (2006); 84,174,092 (2005); 78,181,900 (2000)

Internet Users (2000): 2,000,000 (source: ITU)

Internet Usage (2000): 2.6%

Internet Users (2005): 7,820,000 (source: C.I.Almanac)

Internet Usage (2005): 9.3%

While the latest data was taken at the end of 2005, the growth of internet users must have also increased by then. However, also bear in mind that the population is also growing so that percentage shouldn’t have been affected that much. Still, the internet usage growth rate from 2000 is 291%. If you extrapolate that, we could make an educated guess of 10.15 Million for 2007 or 11.6% penetration.

Compare that to neighboring countries such as Malaysia (47.8%), Hong Kong (68.2 %), Singapore (66.3%) and we’re way behind. Although there are others like Vietnam (17.5 %), Thailand (12.5%), China (10.4%) and Indonesia (4.5%) so we’re really not that far behind. *heh*