Middle-aged Chinese tourists lead use of mobile payments abroad during Lunar New Year holiday

Middle-aged Chinese travellers were the country’s biggest spenders abroad during the recent Lunar New Year holiday, as these older tourists led the use of mobile payments to go shopping overseas, according to an Alipay study.

That finding, drawn from the more than 40 markets where Alipay is accepted, covered two groups who used the popular mobile payments platform: those born in the period 1960 to 1969 and 1970 to 1979.

They were “the main driving force in outbound tourism and overseas consumption”, according to the report from Alipay, a unit of Ant Financial Services. Hangzhou-based Ant Financial is an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

The average spending through Alipay by outbound travellers from China’s lower-tier cities also outpaced those from top-tier cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the Alipay report said.

“We are excited to see the robust growth in the use of Alipay by overseas travellers from third- and fourth-tier cities, and middle-aged vacationers,” said Janice Chen, the head of business operations at Alipay’s cross-border unit. “This really highlights how mobile payment is taking root in China’s outbound tourism market.”

It also showed how China’s growing middle class has become more affluent, helping increase the adoption of mobile payments by both millennial and older tourists, according to a report jointly released last month by Alipay and global data analytics firm Nielsen.

Alipay’s findings reinforce China’s global leadership in mobile payments. The world’s second-largest economy and biggest smartphone market had an estimated 890 million people using mobile payments last year, with a 92.4 per cent penetration rate among internet users, according to a report on China’s third-party mobile payments market by research firm Ipsos.