With the approaching of the Spring Festival, the Chinese Lunar New Year, telecommunications operators are busy preparing for the "Happy New Year" short message boom during the seven-day break.

A short message monitoring institution in Beijing said that on Saturday alone, which is the New Year's Eve, more than 40 million greeting short messages will be sent per hour on average.

China Mobile, China Unicom, China Netcom and other major telecommunications operators have adopted various measures to ensure that all the messages of festival blessing will quickly reach their target handsets.

China Mobile and China Unicom said they have optimized their short message platforms and strengthened supervision on junk messages.

Short message through mobile phones has become the first choice for Chinese people to greet their family members, relatives, friends and colleagues during major festivals.

During the last Spring Festival, Chinese people sent out a total of 12.6 billion short messages in eight days, or more than 30 for each of the 400 million mobile phone subscribers.

Telecommunications operators are happy to be busy helping send out the short messages, which brought about an income of 1.2 billion yuan (about US$154 million) for them during the last Spring Festival.

The latest statistics show that by the end of November 2006, China's mobile phone subscribers had reached 455 million, and the number of short messages during the festival is expected to surpass the same period last year by a big margin.