PayPal is reportedly planning to launch a cross-border e-commerce solution in China this month. While it isn’t clear yet what form such a solution will take, it’s currently seen as a shortcut to establishing a presence in the country’s digital payments market.
And it’s a tough market to get into for foreign companies, given the state’s tight control over the sector. Right now, the mPayments market, which was valued at a whopping $444 billion USD in the first quarter of this year, is dominated by Alipay, the mPayments subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba. While that company has the lion’s share of the mPayments market, a much smaller slice belongs to the homegrown TenPay; foreign rivals barely have a footprint.
That could be starting to change, though. Last week, it was revealed that Apple had registered a company apparently associated with Apple Pay in China’s free-trade zone, an experimental area in which private competition is permitted. While there had previously been speculation that Apple might one day work in partnership with Alipay to bring Apple Pay to the country, the latter’s dominance of the market seems to have compelled Apple to find some workaround.
And that’s what PayPal seems to be doing, too – finding some kind of indirect entry point into the country’s digital payments market, perhaps having been spurred on by Apple’s maneuvering. ‘Start where you are,’ as the saying goes.
Source: Want China Times
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