20 bln yuan earned in text message in six months

The statistics of the first half year of 2006 released by the Ministry of Information Industry of the People's Republic of China demonstrates that during the first half of the year, China's mobile phone users had already sent 202.96 billion short messages, increasing by 45.8 percent over the same period of last year. The number, if multiplied by 0.1 yuan, means that a sum of more than 20 million Yuan has gone to the operators' pocket.

At the same time, the newly added mobile phone users are increasing rapidly. Up until the end of June, the number of users in China had amounted to 426 million, among which 32.943 million are newly added this year with an average increase per month of 5.4905 million, and the diffusion rate had reached 32.7 per 100 people. It is known that at present there are about 365 million fixed phone users and 92.05 million PHS service users, and the newly added from this year are 14.868 million and 6.724 million respectively, far behind the cell phone users both in total number and newly added number.

Insiders believe that since China Mobile and China Unicom largely reduced their charging fees, the advantages of traditional fixed phones and PHS service are weakening, cell phones have been the users' first choice and fixed telephones will gradually be replaced.

By People's Daily Online