Year of the Text?

February 21, 2007

The arrival of the Chinese Lunar New Year has seen Chinese mobile customers send around 14 billion SMS messages. In the Chinese capital, Beijing, alone, around 400 million text messages were sent during the seven day holiday period.

According to figures from two of the largest mobile companies in China; China Mobile and China Unicom, about 5,800 text messages were sent per second last Saturday in Beijing. During the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year, which begins on the first day of the first lunar month, which this year happened to be on a Sunday, it is traditional, if not imperative, to send and receive messages of good luck.

Last year, according to official statistics, people in China sent 429.6 billion text messages via their mobile phones. This equated to a daily average of up to 1.2 billion. By the end of 2006 there were no fewer than 460 million mobile phones subscribers in China.