Showing posts with label Alipay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alipay. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 06, 2021

Jack Ma: yes, a dressing down, but no real problems – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Western media have been speculating about the whereabouts of Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma after he disappeared from the limelight months ago. Ma did get a dressing down from the government after he ushered criticism, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein to AP. Ma is laying down, but there is no reason he is in real problems, Rein adds.

AP:

Some see Ma’s travails as a warning from the ruling Communist Party that even a wildly successful entrepreneur can’t publicly defy regulators. But finance experts said President Xi Jinping’s government already was uneasy about Alibaba’s dominance in retailing. As for Ant, regulators worried it might add to financial risks seen by the ruling party as one of the biggest threats to China’s economic growth.

Shaun Rein, a business consultant in Shanghai who said he meets Alibaba managers and people who know Ma, said none of them reports the billionaire is in legal trouble.

“They spanked him. He’s learned his lesson, and that’s why he’s been quiet for the past two months,” said Rein, founder of China Market Research Group. “Some of his friends told me they can’t believe how stupid he was.”

Ma, 56, stepped down as Alibaba’s chairman in 2019 but is part of the Alibaba Partnership, a 36-member group with the right to nominate a majority of its board of directors. He is one of the biggest shareholders…

The anti-monopoly investigation of Alibaba announced in December targets its policy that prohibits vendors and other business partners from dealing with its competitors.

Foreign investors were rattled, but Chinese businesspeople are “quite happy” with the crackdown, said Rein.

“A lot of people saw Alibaba and Tencent as monopolies and stifling competition,” he said.

Ma’s high profile is unusual in a society where folk wisdom warns, “a man fears getting famous like a pig fears getting fat.” Others such as Tencent founder Ma Huateng, who is no relation to Jack Ma, are known for avoiding reporters and public appearances.

More in AP.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list. 

Monday, November 02, 2020

How China proved to be a winner in innovation – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Only half a decade ago Silicon Valley thought China becoming a force of innovation was preposterous. Now, under Trump, China has proved them wrong, says business analyst Shaun Rein in a wide-ranging interview with state paper Global Times. Also: China’s successful fight against Covid-19 and decoupling economies.

Global Times:

GT: You have written three books: The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation, and Individualism in Asia, The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that Will Disrupt the World, and The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order. Does the end of “copycat China” and “cheap China” mean that innovation has become major trend happening within Chinese companies? How might this affect other major technological powers, especially the US?

Rein: In 2014, I published The End of Copycat China, where I predicted that China was going to become an innovation powerhouse. At that time, Silicon Valley criticized me heavily. They said I was crazy. They said that the Chinese were not creative, were culturally unable to innovate, and that the Chinese government stifled innovation.

But six years after I published the book, it’s quite clear that China is an innovation powerhouse. When it comes to mobile services, it’s three-plus-years ahead of the US, and maybe five years ahead of Western Europe. Because of China’s lead in mobile services innovation, we were able to better contain COVID-19. For example, in China, almost everybody uses WeChat Pay or Alipay. It’s a cashless, contactless society. In the US, people are still using cash and credit cards, which may also spread COVID-19. The US still has a lead in semiconductors, with platforms like Android and IOS.

But that’s not because China can’t do it. It’s because there are so many low-hanging fruits. Why would China invest in semiconductors when it could just buy American semiconductors and focus on making money with mobile services innovations? China clearly was looking for a win-win trade policy with the US. Chinese companies were not stealing IP. They are willing to pay for American technology. It was easier and a win-win situation for everyone.

But because of the Trump administration’s trade war and containment policy, China has now begun to focus on innovation with semiconductors and operating systems. It’s not easy. It will take five to 10 years. But we see China has set up a semiconductor fund of about $30 billion. We also see that Huawei is focused on its HarmonyOS. Chinese companies now have to focus on self-reliance. And it would be stupid for the US to think that Chinese cannot innovate with semiconductors or operating systems.

I think the Trump administration is shooting the US in the foot. American tech companies are now not able to sell to their biggest customers in China. My firm works with many American tech companies, and we develop their strategies. They are furious about Trump’s policies because they are now losing their biggest market. And they are scared to openly criticize, because they worry that Trump will attack them on Twitter and get his hawkish American politicians to boycott their products.

More at Global Times.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more experts on innovation at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Monday, September 14, 2020

China’s fintech explosion – Sara Hsu

 

Financial analyst Sara Hsu, co-author of the 2020 publication “China’s fintech explosion“, discusses how tech companies became the leaders in fintech, leaving the country’s giant banks behind. She addresses an online panel of USC’s US-China Institute and explains how an underserved community offers a fertile basis for the fintech explosion.

Sara Hsu is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

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Friday, September 11, 2020

Why China’s digital yuan does not create a reserve currency – Victor Shih

 

Victor Shih

The creation of a digital currency does not mean China can create a reserve currency for the international markets, says financial expert Victor Shih in Quartz. Domestically, it could mean the digital currency could try to catch back the financial room now occupied by commercial players like Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat, he adds.

Quartz:

What investors are looking for in a reserve currency isn’t the technology—it’s a currency that’s stable, underpinned by a strong economy, freely convertible, and able to be used widely.

Victor Shih, an expert on China’s political economy and a professor at University of California San Diego, explained that merely introducing a digital currency “doesn’t solve the problem that some people holding renminbi offshore will want to sell that renminbi and exchange it for the dollar,” which is widely considered to be a safer asset. Here the gap is even larger: Nearly two-thirds of the world’s currency reserves are held in US dollars, compared with 2% in renminbi, the currency’s official name.

Suppose Iran sold China a large amount of oil, and accepted the digital yuan as payment. That would help with Beijing’s goal of pursuing more widespread use of the yuan in international transactions. But Tehran would probably want to use at least a quarter of those earnings to buy goods from Europe, said Shih, so they would need to convert a portion of the digital yuan into dollars and euros, the second-most used currency for global payments.

“If that happened on a very large scale, you’d have hundreds of billions of renminbi accumulating in Hong Kong,” a major clearing center for yuan-denominated transactions. And if those yuan were converted to another currency in large amounts, “the renminbi will be under downward pressure and the PBOC will have to step in” to prop up its value.

Still, the digital yuan could be one way for the state to try and wrest back control of digital payments from commercial companies, but it’s unclear what that would mean for the two dominant digital wallets, Alipay and WeChat Pay, who handle 94% of electronic payment transactions (link in Chinese). The central bank could theoretically ban commercial wallets like Alipay outright to eliminate competition, Shih said, but “that would be pretty terrible.”

One key advantage of people using digital yuan, Shih said, is enabling China’s central bankers to track exactly where every yuan is going in greater detail than possible at present. If Iran made purchases with its digital yuan earnings, for example, the PBOC would be able to see what it’s bought, and from whom, down to the cent. Yet the same thing that makes a virtual currency attractive to China’s government could work against it elsewhere—there are lots of situations when even perfectly law-abiding people don’t want governments to know what they’re doing, particularly when that government is the Communist Party of China.

Shih does see one potential opportunity: weaving the digital yuan into a payment systems on platforms like TikTok, the viral video app owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and boasting hundreds of millions of users, or in popular video games like Fortnite, developed by Epic Games, which is 40%-owned by Chinese tech firm Tencent.

“That’s the thing about the digital world,” said Shih. “Everything is potentially linkable so you can leverage popularity on one platform to get popularity on another platform.”

More in Quartz.

Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

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Monday, August 31, 2020

Ant Group's IPO: the largest ever, and its background - Shaun Rein

 
Jack Ma's Ant Group is heading for a listing at the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock markets, for possibly up to 300 billion US dollars, the largest in the world ever. Business analyst Shaun Rein looks into the company's background and its largest success in China, Alipay, on the BBC. 

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form. 

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Monday, November 11, 2019

How does Alipay works for foreign tourists? - Ashley Dudarenok

Ashley Dudarenok
Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok is enthusiastic about the announcement of Alipay to open up for tourists visiting China, followed shortly by a similar move by WeChat. On her vlog, she explains how visitors without a Chinese bank account can now use Alipay. Details on WeChat were not yet known at the moment of recording.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Alipay, WeChat at last opened for foreigners - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein
Alipay and WeChat, China's largest payment options, opened their services for foreign credit card holders, and it was about time too, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein, author of the bestseller The War for China's Wallet: Profiting from New World Order to the South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post:
“A lot of restaurants now in China now only accept Alipay or WeChat Pay, and so the problem is you can’t go and eat in a lot of restaurants you want to go to,” said Shaun Rein, founder of the China Market Research Group and author of “The War for China’s Wallet.”
“The other thing that foreigners complain about is that it’s very difficult for them to book taxis or to arrange for tickets, like at the Forbidden City and a lot of national attractions.”
Unlike in the West, China’s consumers leapfrogged credit cards and have gone straight from cash to smartphones. One reason is that Chinese apps have embraced the QR code — a far simpler, cheaper and more accessible payment method compared to NFC, adopted by Western apps like Apple Pay... 
“A lot of supermarkets might have one cash-only counter — very often they never even open it — or you might have a hundred people over the age of 70 standing in line trying to buy items because they don’t know how to use a mobile phone,” said Rein... 
Rein... thinks privacy concerns won’t stop foreigners from using these apps in China, where alternatives like Apple Pay are far less popular. 
“When they’re in China, if they don’t have the apps, they can’t function,” he said. “So the convenience of it outweighs any privacy concerns. And that’s what you’re seeing with mainland Chinese consumers as well.”
“Alibaba and Tencent have way too much data on every individual mainlander. They know exactly where we’re traveling, what we’re buying, who we’re going with, what we’re watching… But mainlanders still use [the apps] because of the convenience. And I expect that foreigners are going to do the same once they’re in China.”
More at the South China Morning Post.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts on China's digital transformation? Do check out this list.  

Tuesday, September 03, 2019

WeChat: still expanding, despite its dominance - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
Tencent's WeChat and its mini-programs are still very much in the expansion mode, says WeChat expert Matthew Brennan, even though two out of three Chinese use the tool, he tells the Asia Nikkei Review.

 Asia Nikkei Review:
Consumers, often, are all but forced to use some super apps, like it or not. In Hangzhou, the birthplace of Alipay, a number of restaurants, coffee shops and supermarkets only accept the e-payment service. Similarly, few people bring stacks of business cards to conferences in China -- they simply add each other on WeChat. 
With two out of three Chinese on WeChat, the app "is so ubiquitous" that it has essentially become a "public utility," said Matthew Brennan, managing director of Shanghai-based tech consultancy China Channel, who specializes in WeChat-based marketing. 
"It is like your phone number, water, gas and electricity," Brennan said. 
As popular as it is now, WeChat is still in expansion mode. Tencent has made companies and developers an offer that is hard to refuse: They can build a mini-app for WeChat cheaper and faster than a conventional app... 
Companies that helped drive WeChat's rise are showing they are not necessarily wedded to it. Brennan, who is writing a book about the super app, said top Chinese ride hailer Didi Chuxing used to rely on WeChat to attract passengers. Now, he said Didi -- which is also backed by Tencent -- gets about 90% of its orders through its own app. 
"They want direct access [to users]," Brennan said. "Otherwise, their business is at risk."
More in the Asia Nikkei Review.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Thursday, July 05, 2018

Why Alipay has a hard time cracking Hong Kong - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein
Alibaba has been successful in cracking China's financial markets, but going global, even to Hong Kong proves to be tough. The difference: innovating in China proved to be long overdue, while Hong Kong had already a well developed financial system, says financial analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China's Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order, to the South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post:
But AlipayHK faces competition from other providers as well as a mature payments market in Hong Kong, dominated by the city’s home-grown Octopus stored-value card. 
“The Octopus card was very innovative, allowing people to store money on a card and pay for the MTR or 7-Eleven. But this was so popular that it hurt innovation,” said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group. 
“Everybody in Hong Kong has a credit or debit card, so there isn’t a pressing need to figure out a new form of payments system, because what they had worked, while Hong Kong is also so convenient that e-commerce hasn’t taken off in any meaningful way, so there also isn’t a need for online or mobile payments to take off,” he said. 
Adding to the difficulty are concerns over data privacy because of a perceived connection between AlipayHK and its mainland China peer Alipay, as AlipayHK discovered in a recent survey it commissioned in Hong Kong. The survey found that only 30 per cent of the 1,049 respondents had experience of mobile payments, while over 55 per cent expressed worries over “personal data leakage”.
More in the South China Morning Post.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more financial analysts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Monday, April 02, 2018

Both Alipay and WeChat Pay can survive in China - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
Much attention goes to the epic battle between China's internet giants Alibaba and Tencent. But WeChat expert Matthew Brennan does not see why one of their payment systems, Alipay and WeChat Pay, should defeat the other. He sees room enough for both, he tells That's Magazine.

That's Magazine:
At present, China’s two major players in the mobile payment space, Alipay and WeChat Pay, hold about 54 and 40 percent of the market share respectively, according to a 2017 iResearch report. China Channel cofounder Matthew Brennan attributes their dominance to the strengths of their parent companies, ecommerce giant Alibaba, and Tencent, the world’s most valuable social network conglomerate... 
Brennan adds, “Both platforms, however, have successfully adapted themselves into the virtual world and into the offline economy… at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s about one winning or losing, as both are well-equipped to thrive in the market.” 
The US might be the world’s largest economy, but when it comes to mobile payment, the Chinese are way ahead. China’s total mobile payment transaction revenue was 50 times more than their American counterparts in 2016. Meanwhile, 52 percent of Chinese say less than 20 percent of their monthly transactions are conducted with bills and coins, according to the ‘2017 Mobile Payment Usage in China’ study published by China Tech Insights. 
Credit card companies and many Westerners’ ingrained habit of using cards as their primary payment option have prevented mobile payments from taking off, according to Brennan...  In a country where Visa, Mastercard and American Express still have yet to fully penetrate through the masses, Chinese consumers were able to easily move on from cash and plug themselves directly into the ecosystem that Alipay and WeChat Pay have created.
More at That's Magazine.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more fintech experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Thursday, March 01, 2018

How Alibaba and Tencent retail strategies differ - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
China is leading the way in digitalizing the consumer experience in retail, but both major competitors - Alibaba and Tencent - have different retail strategies, says WeChat expert Matthew Brennan to the News Lens. Alibaba focuses on the offline experience, Tencent's WeChat will stay online. In 2018 the battle will be on mobile payment, he adds.

The News Lens:
Matthew Brennan, founder of China Channel, a consultancy on China's digital market, said that the trend is apparent across all consumer-facing industries. "China is leading the rest of the world in terms of digitalizing the customer experience and blending this experience seamlessly between offline and online elements," Brennan said. According to Brennan, retailers are moving back to offline as online growth matures – being a purely online play will no longer sustain the rapid growth that Alibaba and Tencent are used to. 
Tencent’s payment service, WeChat Pay, already has about 800 million users in China, and together with Alibaba's Alipay, the pair dominate China’s massive mobile payment space. The majority of retailers here, from supermarkets to street vendors, now accept either or both forms of payment. As such, the latest official data showed mobile payments reached 81 trillion yuan in the first 10 months of last year, up 40 percent on the whole of 2016. While Tencent has its fingers in many pies, it is not a direct retailer, and instead relies on a partnership with e-commerce major JD.com in place since 2014 to drive sales through WeChat Pay. 
The two companies announced in October that they would expand the cooperation via the launch of the JD-Tencent Retail Marketing Solutionwhich according to a press release promises to “integrate insights on consumer behavior from Tencent’s social platforms with online and offline shopping data from JD and its brand partners.” Pushing into unmanned stores is thus a natural next step for Tencent as it attempts to remain relevant in "new retail" while building on its existing strength in the mobile payments market. 
"WeChat does not have ambitions to open its own stores across China, Tencent's strategy is to partner with existing retail players and help digitalize the retail experience," Brennan explained. "Both [Alibaba] and Tencent are now moving into a wide variety of vertical industries for a variety of reasons, retail though is the most important battleground for 2018. “In the short term, new retail is in large part about mobile payments. Tencent and Alibaba are blocking each other's moves to protect their market share in payments."
More in the News Lens.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form. 

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list. 

Monday, October 23, 2017

How Alipay, WeChat became top-brands in China - Tom Doctoroff

Tom Doctoroff
Alipay, WeChat and Android are top brands, the Chinese consumer could not live without, says a recent report. Looking at brands works in China pretty different from the rest of the world, says branding expert Tom Doctoroff in the South China Morning Post. “There is no way in America that you are going to have PayPal [the western equivalent of Alipay] to rank No. 1,” Doctoroff adds.

The South China Morning Post:
All three Chinese companies on the top 10 brands list are technology related, with the music app NetEase Cloud Music coming in at No. 10, the global branding and marketing consultancy Prophet said on Thursday as it unveiled its 2017 brand relevance index for China. 
“Chinese consumers today live, work and play in a connected, digital world, so the brands that deliver useful, easily accessible and enjoyable experiences are going to be the most relevant to their lives,” said Tom Doctoroff, a senior partner at Prophet. 
The rest of the list is dominated by brands that include Ikea, Apple, Nike, Estee Lauder, BMW and Marriot hotels. 
The consultancy surveyed more than 13,500 Chinese consumers in 39 cities on the mainland about which among 235 household brands in 30 industries were most relevant to them this summer... 
“Overall, the relationship between digital and individual in the West is significantly more functional,” Doctoroff told the South China Morning Post in Shanghai. “But In China, where ambitions are huge but social regimentation keeps people from [expressing themselves or] realising their ambitions, people project a lot of their emotions onto their digital selves. 
“So that’s why I think these tech brands are all so rich and meaningful for people – it is not just an utilitarian, convenient relationship,” he said. 
“There is no way in America that you are going to have PayPal [the western equivalent of Alipay] to rank No. 1,” Doctoroff said, stressing the more apparent emotional connection between tech brands and Chinese consumers.
More in the South China Morning Post.

Tom Doctoroff is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Monday, October 16, 2017

How WeChat started to promote WeBank - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
E-commerce expert Matthew Brennan discovered how WeChat silently started to promote Tencent's WeBank, a potentially major move in pushing internet banking ahead of the traditional banks in China, he writes on his website China Channel. The old banks will have to run for their money.

Matthew Brennan:
A few days ago a small but potentially important new change on WeChat was quietly released without any official announcement (to date). There’s now finally a way to get around WeChat Pay’s yearly balance transaction limit and it seems that this is now WeChat’s first serious move to promote WeBank, which makes it a big deal... 
WeChat Pay currently has a yearly user balance transaction limit of 200,000 RMB (roughly 30,000 USD). For power WeChat Pay users and small businesses alike, this limit has caused some pain. Yet in the past few days, it seems a small but potentially important new change on WeChat was released without any fanfare.. 
This new move is just one of the recent ways that WeChat Pay is trying to make up ground with Alipay in terms of providing mobile financial products and services by leveraging WeBank. Another big one is WeChat’s Lingqiantong 零钱通 feature which allows users to earn daily interest on the balance left in their WeChat wallet, a very similar feature to Alipay’s massively successful Yu’e bao 余额宝.... 
Bye, bye traditional banks. We don’t need you anymore. WeChat and Alipay control the relationship with the customer. They find smart ways to incentivize users to open up accounts at their own internet banks and link those up instead.
More at the China Channel.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Monday, September 25, 2017

Are Alibaba and Tencent becoming too powerful? - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
Both Tencent and Alibaba have become power players, even eclipsing the formerly leading economic state-owned companies, says innovation-specialist Matthew Brennan in ATimes. So maybe they [think they] need to clip their wings a little,” adds Mr Brennan.

ATimes:
In many ways what they are doing dovetails with the central government’s goals of restructuring China into a service oriented economy, and making the country a leader in technological innovation. Because of this, industry leaders have clearly been given the green light thus far to forge ahead with their disruptions. 
But Matthew Brennan of China Channel, a consultancy that has followed Tencent since it was listed in 2014, tells the Financial Times that he agrees with those who believe it and Alibaba have become too powerful. 
Alipay and WeChat pay says Mr Brennan, for example, are good for the economy and put China at the cutting edge of mobile payments. But at the same time “they are undercutting the SOE banking sector and have done so very rapidly, and that could lead to instability . . . too much disruption going on could spill over into unrest. So maybe they [think they] need to clip their wings a little,” adds Mr Brennan. 
Warning signs, as the FT writes, seem to be largely concentrated in the payments, financial services and gaming industries.
More in ATimes.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Monday, August 21, 2017

Overseas fintech strategies for Alibaba and Tencent - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
After a killing domestic competition between Alibaba and Tencent, the fintech branches of both take their struggle international. Fintech analyst Matthew Brennan looks in TechNode at the strategies of Alipay and WeChat to conquer foreign markets.

TechNode:
From Alibaba’s perspective, it’s more appropriate to define the initiative (to go international) as the globalization of Ant Financial’s whole financial ecosystem, of which Alipay is just one part, according to the Ant Financial spokeswoman. Ant Financial expects half of its users coming from overseas market in the future four years, local media has reported (in Chinese). 
On the other hand, social networking and gaming giant Tencent is also trying a similar path with investments in Australia-based cross-border payment startup Airwallex, shortly after Tencent co-founder Zeng Liqing invested in RoyalPay, another Aussie cross-border payment service April this year. 
“Both Alipay and WeChat Pay are going after tourists first… In stage two, they will open up local wallets to enable peer-to-peer transactions within the local economies. That’s quite ambitious because there’s a lot of regulations,” commented Matthew Brennan, co-founder of China Channel. 
“In order to enable that, they have to partner with local companies. It is a slow process in most places. In many countries, I think it’s most likely impossible. Tencent has local wallets in South Africa and Hong Kong. They are able to do it in South Africa because of Naspers, which is a key investor in Tencent. The same for Hong Kong as its so close to China. But every other country is challenging for them,” he added.
More in TechNode.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more experts in China's outbound investment strategies? Do check out this list.

Monday, July 24, 2017

China: bound to be the first cashless society - Ben Cavender

Ben Cavender
A decade ago, in China cash was king. But in less than another decade, the same country could be the first fully cashless society, says business analyst Ben Cavender to AFP. Cavender estimates China's mobile payment market is already 40-50 times larger than the United States.

AFP:
China was the first country in the world to use paper money but centuries later the soaring popularity of mobile payment has some analysts forecasting it could be the first to stop. 
The gross merchandise value of third party mobile payment rose more than 200 percent to 38 trillion yuan (about $5.6 trillion) in 2016 from a year earlier, according to China-based iResearch. 
The growth of the cash-free system has been supported by China's rapidly expanding e-commerce market as Chinese shoppers increasingly shun bricks and mortar stores. "I think it's really very possible that China becomes the first or one of the first cashless societies in the next decade," said Ben Cavender, a director at China Market Research Group. 
Cavender estimates China's mobile payment market is already 40-50 times larger than the United States. 
Alipay, started by e-commerce giant Alibaba and now owned by its affiliate Ant Financial, and WeChat Pay, which is built into Tencent's popular messaging service, have hundreds of millions of users between them and are China's dominant payment platforms. In Beijing it is hard to find a product or a service that cannot be purchased with a mobile.
More in AFP.

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Apple: a ripple in China's fintech markets - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan
Online payments have gained market share in China very fast, but that market is dominated by domestic players like Tencent and Alibaba, while foreign ones like Apple are less than a ripple, says fintech expert Matthew Brennan at Pymnts.

Pymnts:
Ant Financial and Tencent could both potentially  surpass credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard in total global transactions per day in the coming year, as they offer merchants a cheaper and more accessible QR-based option that is more desirable than a more costly upgrade to payments terminals for cards. 
That nearly ubiquitous presence among merchants online and off in China’s major retail sector has lead to an incredibly mobile-dominated marketplace full of some very loyal customers. 
At present, according to analyst Matthew Brennan, Alipay and WeChat Pay collectively control some 67 percent of the Chinese payments market in major cities — compared to Union Pay’s 22 percent and cash’s 11 percent. 
Apple Pay, which launched in China over a year ago? Less than 1 percent. And not for lack of trying or interest. Apple went into the market with an alliance with Union Pay — the nation’s only state-backed issuer of six billion cards that are accepted at major retail stores all over China. They also enlisted participation from 19 Chinese banks, including its four largest. They even managed to get three million customers to link their cards to an Apple Pay account within the first two days the service was available. 
Full speed ahead? Not so much — it didn’t even make so much as a ripple in the marketplace. According to Brennan’s data, 67 percent of store clerks have no idea how the service even works — and built in, smartphone-based payments tools are an order of magnitude less popular among Chinese consumers than app-based systems that use the more understandable and accessible QR codes.
More at Pymnts.

Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more fintech experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.