China's mobile phone users might send more than 18 billion text messages during the week-long Spring Festival that runs until January 31, telecom operators said Monday.

Many of this year's messages feature a play on words. Under the lunar calendar, 2009 is the year of the Ox, or "niu" in Chinese. So millions of people have gotten greetings saying "Happy Niu Year."

Text messaging has become increasingly popular during the festival, the biggest holiday in China. Last Lunar New Year, 17 billion messages were sent, compared with 15.2 billion in 2007, 12.6 billion in 2006 and 11 billion in 2005.

Staff at China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, the top three telecom operators, said the 2009 projection was based on data patterns that link messaging and the rise of mobile phone users.

China's mobile phone population hit 641 million in 2008, up 17 percent from 2007, for a mobile phone penetration rate of 48.5 percent.

Just under 700 billion text messages were sent in China last year, up 18.2 percent year-on-year.

With third-generation (3G) telecommunication technology in pilot use in some cities, industry analysts expected multimedia messages to spice up the holiday life of at least some users.

But it remains too early to tell the market effect of 3G mobile phones as the communication networks are still being built.

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued long-awaited 3G licenses, with China Mobile getting the domestically-developed TD-SCDMA standard, China Telecom receiving a license for the U.S.-developed CDMA2000 and China Unicom getting permission to operate Europe's WCDMA.

(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2009)