Jamie Smyth,

Technology Reporter

Irish consumers rang in the New Year by sending a record number of text messages as mobile phone companies experienced their best Christmas sales season for several years.

Vodafone, the State's biggest mobile phone firm with some 1.7 million subscribers, said yesterday it had recorded 8.8 million messages on its network on New Year's Eve, which was an increase of 1.8 million texts on last year.

The busiest period for texting was between 11 p.m. and midnight on New Year's Eve when one million text messages were sent, an increase of 228,000 on the same hour last year, according to Vodafone statistics.

O2, which has about 1.2 million Irish subscribers, recorded 6.2 million text messages on Christmas Day alone, an increase of 1.2 million on the 2003 figure.

The company said yesterday it had not yet recorded the total number of text messages sent on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. But it predicted that the final figure could reach eight million, an increase of one million on the figure recorded last year.

Meteor, which has more than 150,000 subscribers, said more than 16 million text messages had been carried on its network during Christmas week.

Mr Conor Carmody, head of sales at Meteor, said the level of business recorded at the firm's retail stores was at least twice as busy as last year's Christmas.

"There have been reports that high street sales in the run-up to Christmas were down 10-20 per cent on last year," he said. "But there has been no evidence of this in the mobile business."

Mr Carmody said the company had found it difficult to keep up with the strong consumer demand for mobile handsets in the lead-up to Christmas period.

"Demand outstripped supply and we could have had a stronger Christmas if there were more handsets available. This was an international issue as vendors found it difficult to keep up with demand," said Mr Carmody.

None of the three domestic mobile companies would give an accurate breakdown of the total number of handset sales in the Irish market, citing stock exchange restrictions. But prior to Christmas, Carphone Warehouse predicted total handset sales of about 320,000 for the Irish market. This would be a major increase on the 250,000 units sold at Christmas 2002/3.

International telecoms analysts had noted strong pent-up demand for camera phone handsets that were capable of sending multimedia messages before Christmas. Increased sales of this type of handset have helped the international mobile market to recover from a dip in sales in 2002. Gartner estimates that global mobile phone sales will now total 500 million in 2003.