Mainland China has become the world’s largest and fastest-growing market for proximity mobile payments, with more than a third of the nation’s smartphone subscribers predicted to be using the technology this year, analysts said.
That upbeat forecast by research company eMarketer followed recent initiatives by China UnionPay, the country’s sole domestic bank card organisation, to introduce branded mobile payment services from smartphone suppliers Apple, Samsung Electronics and Xiaomi in the domestic market.
“The phenomenal opportunity for retailers is that smartphone users in China are more willing to store payment information in their phones and experiment with other forms of non-cash payments than users in most developed countries,” eMarketer forecasting analyst Shelleen Shum said on Tuesday.
China’s proximity mobile payments market still remains largely untapped, with usage mostly concentrated in larger cities
Proximity mobile payments are purchases made at the point of sale by tapping, swiping or checking in with a smartphone, using so-called near-field communications (NFC) built in the handset or other technologies like the machine-readable optical label known as QR code.
According to eMarketer, the number of people in China using their mobile phones to pay for goods and services will reach 332.3 million, or 49 per cent of the nation’s smartphone users, by 2020.
That would be up from an estimated 195.3 million people, or 38 per cent of mainland smartphone users, this year. There were 134 million people using proximity mobile payments last year, which made up 28 per cent of smartphone users in the country.
Those estimates by eMarketer included users aged from 14 years old who have made at least one proximity mobile payment transaction on their smartphone in the past six months.