Fewer greetings sent via text and multimedia message

The fever for sending greetings via short text or multimedia messages to relatives and friends cooled during Spring Festival 2014, according to figures from some provincial telecom companies.

China Mobile's Tianjin subsidiary said it recorded 245 million mobile phone messages on Lunar New Year's Eve this year, down by 12.5 percent year-on-year. In Shaoxing, an eastern city in Zhejiang province, the number of messages sent on Lunar New Year's Eve decreased by 21 percent year-on-year.

China's three telecom carriers did not disclose their nationwide figures for such messages during Spring Festival this year. But industry insiders expect the total number of short text messages to have dropped by 10 percent and multimedia messages by 20 percent from the same holiday period the previous year.

Overall, eastern areas witnessed a more significant drop than middle and western Chinese areas. That is because eastern regions are usually equipped with faster, more advanced mobile networks. Young generations in those areas tend to use instant-messaging tools, such as Wechat, to send their New Year's greetings.

On Lunar New Year's Eve 2013, China Mobile, the country's biggest telecom carrier, serviced 9.1 billion text messages, an increase of 3 percent year-on-year. The company also carried more than 250 million multimedia messages, up 18 percent from the same period a year earlier.