After a slow start, Hongkongers have taken to the SMS trend, with more than 200 million being sent and received by mobile phone users every month
Text messaging has exploded in popularity in Hong Kong, with people now sending and receiving more than 200 million messages a month.
Although the low cost of mobile phone calls in Hong Kong initially meant that the new medium was slower to catch on than elsewhere, the number of text messages sent and received has more than doubled since the middle of last year, when less than 100 million messages a month were recorded.
According to figures from the Office of the Telecommunications Authority, 201,515,726 messages were sent and received in January, the latest month for which figures are available.
That means Hong Kong people are sending and receiving text messages at the rate of more than 2.4 billion a year - the equivalent of one message a day for every man, woman and child in the city .
However, despite having 7.25 million mobile phone subscriptions for a population of 6.8 million, Hong Kong still lags behind the mainland, regional neighbours and overseas countries in the use of text messaging - partly as there is no cost advantage over making a mobile phone call.
In overseas countries such as Britain, where 20 billion text messages were sent last year, users caught on to the technology earlier because of the relative expense of placing mobile calls.