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The number of mobile phone subscribers in China reached a record 377 million at the end of September, said the Ministry of Information Industry on Tuesday.

There is an increase of 43.1 million over the end of last year. On average, China has 4.78 million new mobile phone subscribers a month in the first nine months this year, said the ministry in a press release. At the end of September, there were 29.1 mobile phones for every one hundred Chinese.

Along with the increase of mobile phone subscribers, the business of short messages also witnessed a sharp rise of 40.2 percent year-on-year, to more than 218.5 billion messages in the first nine months, said the ministry.

Though facing heated competition brought by mobile communications, the number of fixed-line subscribers rose 34 million over the end of last year to a total of 345 million by the end of September. By then, there were 26.6 fixed-line subscribers for every one hundred Chinese, the ministry said.

Statistics from the ministry show the total number of telephone users in China, including both mobile phone users and fixed-line users, reached 723 million by the end of September.

The ministry also said that in the first nine months this year China's total revenue of post and telecommunications reached 472.33 billion yuan (58 billion US dollars), up 10.9 percent over the same period last year.

The postal revenue in the period was 41.23 billion yuan (5 billion US dollars), a rise of 4.2 percent year-on-year, and the revenue of telecommunications hit 431.1 billion yuan (53 billion US dollars), up 11.6 percent year-on-year.

China's mobile phone users outnumbered fixed-line phone subscribers in October 2003. China imported its first mobile phone telecom facilities in 1987, and it took a decade for its number of subscribers to jump to 10 million.

Four years later, the number of the country's mobile phone subscribers ranked first in the world.