WeChat sneaking up on heavyweight Alipay

November 24, 2013 Leave a comment

WeChat sneaking up on heavyweight Alipay

Staff Reporter

2013-11-24

With rapid growth among users using the built-in online payment mechanism, WeChat is challenging Alipay in a battle for the online payment market in China. Alipay, a third-party online payment platform established by China’s largest e-commerce operator Alibaba Group, has generated a turnover of 274.79 billion yuan (US$45 billion), accounting for 78.4% of online payments in China, according to iResearch data for the first three quarters of 2013.WeChat, a mobile text and voice messaging communication service developed by Tencent Holdings, is catching up. It claims advantages in the loyalty of its users, a large number of public accounts and stable growth in new users, reported the Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald.

At present, WeChat has over 2 million public accounts and the number of accounts grows 8,000 a day, according to the service.

The growth rate would put the number of WeChat’s public accounts over 2.3 million by the end of the year and past 3 million by next May, said the report.

“If all its users adopt WeChat’s payment mechanism, they would pose a threat to Alipay,” said iMedia CEO Zhang Yi.

As of October, the number of payments on Tencent’s e-commerce website that were closed using the WeChat payment channel reached 350,000. The value of these payments surpassed 100 million yuan (US$16.4 million), according to the report.

Filed under TMT Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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