Oriental Morning Post reports that mobile operators in Shanghai earned over CNY10 million from short message sending on the day before the New Year.

A representative from Shanghai Mobile says the company had 194 million short messages sendt on December 31, 2006, which was 76% more than the normal days during the year and an increase of 34% compared with that on the same day of the previous year.

The short message sending hit the highest record between 17:00 and 22:00 on that day and reached a total of 19.35 million, which was 15 times more than normal.

Shanghai Unicom saw similar increases in SMS. On December 31, 2006, a total of 50 million short messages were sent through Shanghai Unicom's CDMA network and GPRS network, an increase of over 20% compared with those sent during Christmas.