Chinese mobile phone users went on greeting spree during the Spring Festival, sending out 15 billion short messages over the seven day holiday, statistics show.

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From February 17, Chinese Lunar New Year's Eve, to February 23, an average of 33 short messages were sent from each mobile phone, according to figures from China Mobile and China Unicom, the country's top two mobile operators.

The messaging craze brought mobile companies an estimated revenue of 1.5 billion yuan (187.5 million U.S. dollars),as each message costs 0.1 yuan.

Multimedia messages sent during the festival exceeded 170 million, said China Mobile, whose users sent nearly three quarters of all the messages.

With China's mobile users rocketing by over 5.6 million on average in each month, text messaging has become an increasingly popular way of saying "happy new year" during each Spring Festival.

Last year during Spring Festival mobile phone users send 12.6 billion short messages, and in 2005, 11 billion were sent.

China had more than 460 million mobile phone users by the end of last year.

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