Mobile users may have sent 10 bln msgs on New Year's Eve

Chinese mobile phone users may have sent more than 10 billion greeting messages on Sunday, making China Mobile, the country's largest mobile operator, the most profitable company on Lunar New Year's Eve.

Kuang Jie, senior partner of ProKing Management Consulting, made the estimate based on the number of text messages sent by phone users during the same periods of the past two years.

Subscribers of China Mobile's Beijing branch sent 680 million greeting messages on the Lunar New Year's Eve of 2010, while subscribers of the carrier's Shanghai branch sent more than 900 million messages on the Lunar New Year's Eve of 2011, Kuang said.

"Considering that China's mobile subscribers have risen by 11.5 percent year-on-year to reach 975.7 million by the end of December, I think it's highly possible that messages sent on Sunday evening exceeded 10 billion," Kuang said, while adding that China Unicom and China Telecom, the other two mobile operators, also probably cashed in on New Year's Eve.

Short messages have become one of the most popular ways to exchange greetings during the Spring Festival holiday, a time for family reunions.

In February, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will release the total number of messages sent during the seven-day break.