Information from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is that in 2009 a total number of 784.04 billion mobile short messages were sent in China, a year-on-year increase of 8.4%, with an average of 2.1 billion sent daily.

Of these messages, 86% were sent by users of China Mobile.

Statistics published by MIIT show that affected by the gradual withdrawal of the PHS personal access system service, which is also known as Little Smart, the number of short messages sent via the wireless local networks decreased by 45.6% year-on-year to 12.74 billion; while the number of those sent via the mobile communications networks increased by 10.2% to 771.3 billion.

Though China's short message business showed obvious growth in 2009, problems like spam messages and pornographic messages drew wide attention. Xi Guohua, director of MIIT, said during the first nine months of 2009, the ministry had launched the second phase of management of mobile phone information, aiming at eliminating bad information from the mobile phone network. Later in 2009, some companies like China Mobile banned payments to WAP service providers as the company tried to sanitize information on its networks.