Is the end near for text messages in mainland China?

The mobile phone text message may soon become a thing of past on the mainland, government figures suggest.

In the first five months of this year, mainland mobile users each sent an average of 39.8 texts per month, according to the latest statistics released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. That is a fall of 18.4 per cent compared with the same period last year.

The ministry said the decline in texts had been going on for some time thanks to the expansion of the internet and social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo.

Texts generated less than 22 billion yuan (HK$27.6 billion) in revenue for mainland telecommunications companies in the first five months of the year, a 13 per cent fall compared with the same period last year. Mobile internet services brought in more than 100 billion yuan in revenue in the same period, a growth of nearly 50 per cent.

The first text sent using the short messaging service, or SMS, was received in 1992 on the mainland and towards the end of the decade the technology rapidly gained in popularity.

Jiang Yanhong, a mother of a three year-old-girl in Shenzhen, said she used to be a text addict. "Without SMS I probably wouldn't have dated my husband," she said.

Her husband sent her more than 1,000 love messages a month until Jiang became his girlfriend.