"How can they do this? Many clients cannot find me now," said the 24-year-old. "My pager is important to me as in many cases I cannot answer mobile phones, such as when I am in court."

Cai called the company's service hot line only to find that it was jammed by complaining customers like her.

Had she been paying attention, Cai probably wouldn't have been too surprised by last week's message - China's once- popular pager services are suffering through a lengthy slump, as many of their subscribers upgrade to mobile phones.

During the first six months of this year, 10.99 million people in China stopped using pager services, almost as many as all of last year when 12.58 million people turned off their pagers, according to China's Ministry of Information Industry.

While there are still 25.08 million pager users in the country, no one knows how many of them will stick with the technology.

In Shanghai, 50,000 people are giving up their pagers every month, with the total number of users dropping from 3.8 million in 1994 to less than 2 million today.

That decline has led 20 pager service providers to shut their doors, while 30 percent of the remaining 50 service providers say they are losing money.

The main reason for the decline of China's pager service is the rapid growth of the mobile phone market, which now ranks as the world's largest. During the first half of this year, China gained 31.36 million new mobile-phone subscribers, pushing the total number to 176.17 million.

"The popularity of mobile phones is disastrous to us pager service providers, especially with the short- message service that allows people to send short text notes with their mobile phones," said Mo Lijuan, the spokeswoman of Shenzhen-based China Motion Tele-com Development.

The firm launched its pager service in 1992, and as it was the first to offer pager services across major cities on the Chinese mainland as well as Hong Kong, it be-came one of China's three largest pager companies. By early 2000, its user number hit its peak of 2.5 million.

"We knew mobile phones were a challenge to us, and we designed a service that uses SMS to send pager messages to our subscribers' mobile phones, but still people think that's too complicated, so we have to quit the pager industry," said Mo.

China Motion made its quiet announcement in April and then began negotiation with other pager service companies to transfer remaining users to their networks. In Shanghai, it reached a deal recently with Unicom Guomai Communications Co. Ltd., which vows to be the city's largest, best and, maybe, last pager service provider?

The Shanghai-listed company saw its net profit drop 44.28 percent last year from a year earlier to 38.04 million yuan (US$4.58 million), while revenues slipped 31.45 percent from 2000 to 264.43 million yuan.

Both China Motion and Unicom Guomai said the collapse of pager services is inevitable and have revised their business plans.

China Motion's pager service centers have been changed to call centers to offer outsourcing customer support.

For Unicom Guomai, the company will focus on selling handsets, planning mobile phone networks and developing applications for mobile-phone users.

(Shanghai Daily August 8, 2002)