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Short messaging, big business
( 2002-07-11 10:17 ) (1 )

China's dominant mobile carrier said on Wednesday that its customers will send more than 50 billion pieces of short messages this year.

Li Yue, vice-president of China Mobile, announced the figure at the sixth annual conference of GSM China.

The rapid development of SMS, or short messaging services, indicated customers' demand for more data services other than phone calls, he said.

China's mobile carriers charge 0.10 yuan (1 US cent) for each SMS sent. SMS will bring China Mobile 5 billion yuan (US$602 million) in revenues.

The minor carrier China Unicom also said volume of SMS will increase, but company officials would not give an estimate.

China Mobile customers sent 15.9 billion pieces of SMS last year while China Unicom customers sent 3 billion.

Once more Internet content providers begin offering the service, the market will be further stimulated, said Charles Zhang, president of the portal Sohu.com.

More than 300 service providers are now offering jokes, ring tone downloading, news, weather forecasts and cartoons for mobile phone users.

SMS has become popular among young users. Since most Chinese take public transportation to work, SMS has become one of their favourite past-times.

Because SMS charges much less than phone calls -- 0.40 yuan (5 US cents) per phone minute -- many people prefer to save money and send SMS.

China Mobile will launch multimedia messaging services in the fourth quarter to enable people to send photos, text and voice messages via mobile phones, the vice-president said.