12.6 billion short messages sent during Spring Festival

From the eve to the seventh day of the lunar New Year, the average number of messages sent by each mobile phone user exceeded 30, according to China's two mobile phone giants China Mobile and China Unicom.

The two mobile giants users sent some 9.5 billion and 3.1 billion short messages respectively during the eight-day holiday with their incomes approaching 1.2 billion yuan.

With the popularization of mobile phones in China, more and more people tend to use short message to communicate with each other. Statistics show China registered 393 million mobile phone users at the end of 2005.

The total number of short messages sent in 2000 was 1 billion, and 304.6 billion in 2005, an increase of 300 times over six years, the number in 2001 was 18.9 billion and 90 billion in 2002, 137.1 billion in 2003 and 217.7 billion in 2004.

By People's Daily Online