Beijing, Jan 24 (IANS) Chinese mobile phone users may have sent more than 10 billion greeting messages Sunday, an expert said.

Kuang Jie, senior partner of ProKing Management Consulting, made the estimate based on the number of text messages sent by phone users during the same periods of the past two years.

Subscribers of China Mobile’s Beijing branch sent 680 million greeting messages on the Lunar New Year’s eve of 2010, while subscribers of the carrier’s Shanghai branch sent more than 900 million messages on the Lunar New Year’s eve of 2011, Kuang said.

“Considering that China’s mobile subscribers have risen by 11.5 percent year-on-year to reach 975.7 million by the end of December, I think it’s highly possible that messages sent on Sunday evening exceeded 10 billion,” Kuang said.

Short messages have become one of the most popular ways to exchange greetings during the Spring Festival holiday, a time for family reunions.