TMCnet News
A Country on the SMS Spree(Comtex Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)SHENZHEN, Feb 08, 2006 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) --During the Spring Festival holidays, usually seven to nine days, telecom carriers, SMS websites, and SMS providers were seeing their big pay days. For one day alone before the Spring Festival, mobile phone users in Shenzhen sent 80 million short messages, generating sales of CNY 8 million for telecom carriers. And the number for the country was 12 billion pieces of short messages during the holidays, an equivalent of 10 pieces for each Chinese. Latest figures indicate that since 2000 short message volume has been increasing by leaps and bounds as mobile phones become ubiquitous in China. In 2001, the country sent 18.9 billion short messages through mobile phones, hitting 217.7 billion pieces by the end of 2004, and 304.6 billion for 2005. Given that each piece of short message costs CNY 0.1, China Mobile and China Unicom, the two leading Chinese mobile telecom carriers would make CNY 1.2 billion during the Spring Festival of 2006. Numbers from Shenzhen Mobile, the branch of China Mobile in Shenzhen, show that for the day before the festival, mobile phone users in Shenzhen sent 80 million pieces of short messages. Chinese cell phone users sent a total of 304.6 billion short messages last year, a 300-fold increase over the figure for 2000, according to the Ministry of Information Industry of China. The short message business has been booming in China over the past five years since 2000, when cell phone users sent over one billion pieces of message. The short message has undergone 13 years of development since the transmission of the first one as transmitted around the world from Great Britain in 1992. People in China have been showing a growing preference for the short message, which has been turned out to be one of the means the Chinese people have employed to extend the lunar New Year's greetings to their relatives and friends. Statistics from the ministry show the total number of telephone users in China, including both mobile phone users and fixed-line users, reached 731 million by the end of October. China's mobile phone users outnumbered fixed-line phone users in October 2003. Along with the increase of mobile phone users, the business of short messages also witnessed a sharp rise of 40.1 percent year-on-year, to more than 246.6 billion messages in the first ten months of 2005. As the pioneer of reform and development of China, Guangdong has been mirroring the whole national economy. In the IT sector, the story is the same. Guangdong Province now is standing head and shoulders above its counterparts in China in the information technology industry. By the end of November 2005, Guangdong's telecommunications industry saw total sales of CNY 83.4 billion, accounting for one seventh of the country's total revenue. In the meanwhile, growth of telephone subscribers was getting slower than ever before in the province. For last November alone, newly added telephone users were 900,000, much fewer than the comparable period one year ago. The number of mobile phone subscribers in China is predicted to rise to 520 million by 2008 and 600 million by 2010, according to earlier state reports. It is estimated that the mobile telecommunications market will contribute CNY 500 billion to China's total GDP for 2005, or eight percent to 10 percent of the national total. (USD 1 = CNY 8.0802) From www.sznews.com, Page 1, Tuesday, February 07, 2006 [email protected] |