SMS use is falling in China

"WeChat is pretty much ubiquitous in China these days, and the rise of the popular messaging app is seen in the huge impact it’s had on how people use SMS. Or, rather, how people have largely stopped using SMS. New figures from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) show that people in China send an average of 39.8 text messages per month – which is barely more than one per day (well, 1.3 to be precise). In these new figures for January to May 2014, MIIT says that people in China sent 314.62 billion SMS in that period, which is down 18.4 percent from the same period in 2013. In that timeframe, the nation saw 27.25 million new phone subscribers – but not even all those new accounts can stop SMS from dying off. The country now has a total of 1.26 billion registered phone subscribers, though a number of people have multiple SIMs. MMS – those annoying, often spammy, usually faulty multimedia messages – fell even more sharply. 26.09 billion MMS were sent from January to May, which is down 30.6 percent on the same period last year."
Source:  Tech In Asia, 23rd June 2014