Hrmmm....It looks like I conflated a total unemployment figure from
December with an "Urban unemployment" figure from February. My numbers
are a little off kilter. Allegedly so are theirs. Apparently the "urban
unemployment" number is considered a very low count because there are
200 million migrant workers who don't count as "urban" in their census.
Apparently they don't know how many unemployed they really have.
In any case the scale of the numbers over there is big enough that 20
million phone subscriptions isn't far from a rounding error.
On 3/24/2020 8:46 PM, Adam Moffett wrote:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-23/china-s-mobile-carriers-lose-15-million-users-as-virus-bites
Apparently it's about 20 million mobile phone subscriptions canceled
over the course of January and February combined. Except they have
1.6 Billion mobile subscriptions. That's about 0.6% drop each month.
If you had 2000 subscribers that'd be like 12 cancelling in January
and 12 cancelling in February. You would probably notice, but it's
not as insane as the raw number would imply.
They have a workforce of around 750,000,000.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/employed-persons
Their unemployment rate went from 3.6% in December to 6.2% in
February.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/16/china-economy-millions-lose-their-jobs-as-unemployment-spikes.html
A change of 2.5%, which is 18,750,000 people. How many of them paid
for a phone for a spouse/kid/girlfriend?
Sorry, I'm thinking that 20,000,000 mobile phone subscriptions lost
actually seems to add up just fine.
On 3/24/2020 4:14 PM, Matt Hoppes wrote:
Regarding the China numbers... there are 3 Chinese mobile telephone
companies, all owned by the government.
In February, they reported a TOTAL (all 3) loss of 10 million + lines.
Now, you can attribute some of those to job loss... but not all of them.
Deaths? I suspect the death count in China is massively underreported.
--
AF mailing list
AF@af.afmug.com
http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com