Mobile payments grow 707 percent in China

China Mobile commerce ticketing payments

Spending reached $200 billion while this growth occurred throughout 2013.

According to recent data released by iResearch, a data analysis and online tracking service, the total independent mobile payments transaction volume in China reached approximately $200 billion, last year (1219.74 billion yuan).

This represents an increase of 707 percent over the figures that were seen in 2012.

The services that were included in the analysis by iResearch included various forms of mobile payments not including the large established banks and massive conventional services such as China UnionPay and the bank card association. The analysis also took peer to peer money transfers into their data for this report.

The results of the report have shown that mobile payments are what is driving the industry.

China Mobile paymentsThough shopping and mobile commerce had once been the primary use of smartphones and tablets for transactions, that trend has changed in China. Now, paying off credit cards, completing money transfers, and using other apps to send and receive money have greatly surpassed m-commerce.

Among the trends that has been on its way down was transactions via text messages. The data showed that over the last three years, that form of transaction has plummeted from having been 92.5 percent of the payments in 2010, to reach only a tiny 6.1 percent last year. Instead, the strong areas in 2013 were in the transactions conducted through apps and other smartphone based services. Those made up 93.1 percent of the exchanged money over mobile devices.

NFC technology based payments also saw a notable decrease, despite the fact that they were not exactly catching fire within that market. After having represented 2.6 percent at the very start of 2013, they dropped down to 0.8 percent by the close of the year. That was the only mainstream form of near field tech, and it clearly never really caught on in China in any meaningful way.

At the same time, other mobile payments solutions, such as the Alipay On-site, which is based on QR codes and other acoustic capabilities, are expected to be the leaders throughout this year. If anything will help to push NFC technology into a meaningful level of adoption in China, it is expected to be services and tech like those.

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