China’s $5.5tn mobile payments sector — more than 50 times bigger than that of the US — is being shaken up by one-time underdog Tencent, which is snatching market share from rival Alibaba.
Alipay, which Alibaba launched in 2004 as a PayPal-type service to facilitate payments on its Taobao ecommerce platform, has long dominated China’s mobile payments. But its share of the market had fallen to nearly half by the end of last year while Tencent’s rose to more than a third.
Alibaba had a 54 per cent market share in the fourth quarter of 2016 compared with 71 per cent in the third quarter of 2015, according to the latest data from consultancy Analysys. Tencent’s share rose to 37 per cent against 16 per cent in the comparable periods. ApplePay, which launched in China early last year, did not feature in the top 10.