Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: sending 17 billion text messages during Spring Festival
Chinese mobile phone operators will benefit from the country’s tradition of exchanging greetings during Lunar New Year as more than 17 billion text messages are expected to be sent during the holiday season, a possible new record, according to the Ministry of Information Industry.
The ministry attributed the drastic rise to rapid expansion of mobile phone users which totaled 547 million by the end of 2007, about 41.6 percent of the total population.
Chinese people sent a total of 592.1 billion text messages in 2007, an average of 1.6 billion a day, bringing in 160 million yuan (approximately US$22 million) in revenue everyday for China’s two mobile phone service providers using the minimum cost of 10 cents per message.
These numbers are quite conservative if compared with the previous growth of the last three Spring Festivals: 11 billion text messages were sent out during the 2005 Chinese New Year period, 12.6 billion in 2006 and 15.2 billion in 2007.
As the government is considering to scrap domestic roaming charges for mobile phones and launch a caller-pay schemes, the ministry predicted that cell phone users would increase at a faster pace than fix-line individual customers.
Another 60 million Chinese are expected to join in the troops of mobile phone users, lifting up the cell phone prevalence rate to 46.4 percent in 2008, it said.
The Chinese People and Their Mobile Phones: sending 17 billion text messages during Spring Festival by Itamar Medeiros, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.