China’s Alipay Has 700 Million Registered Accounts, Beats Paypal?
Two weeks ago I was at Alibaba’s HQ in Hangzhou. One thing that caught my eye was its data room which is dominated by a big screen filled with real-time data about its products, including Taobao, Alibaba.com, Alipay, and all its users.
I took a picture of the Alipay’s data screen, as seen below, which has lots of neat visualizations. I have also included my English translation within the picture to make it understandable.
2週間前、私は杭州市のAlibaba本店にいた。私の目に留まった1つは、Taobao,、Alibaba.com,、Alipayの製品とその全てのユーザーを含むリアルタイムのデータで埋め尽くされた大きなスクリーンに占領されたデータルームだった。
私は下のAlipayのデータのスクリーンの写真を撮ったのだが、そこには多くのすばらしいビジュアライゼーションがある。これをわかりやすくするために写真の中に自分の英語の翻訳も入れた。
Note that the data screen shows that Alipay has a whopping 700 million registered accounts. Obviously, that doesn’t translate to 700 million unique users and Alipay declined to comment on the ratio of active users despite several pressing attempts. But it’s quite fair to say that Alipay’s active accounts figure, I believe, should be ahead of Paypal’s 113 million active accounts figure. But in terms of global reach, Paypal surely has the upper hand with users spanning across 190 markets.
While it’s understandable that folks within mainland China do use Alipay, I’m kinda surprised that the Chinese payment service is somewhat popular in Taiwan too. According to the pictured data, Taiwan roughly has about two million Alipay users which is about ten percent of its total internet population – not too bad of a result. An Alipay rep explained to me:
Many overseas Chinese including people in Taiwan have started to shop on Taobao. In addition, there is also a large population of Taiwanese working in mainland China and shopping on Taobao. That’s why Alipay is quite popular among Taiwanese people.
台湾を含む海外の中国人の多くは、Taobaoでショッピングをし始めました。加えて、非常に多くの台湾人が中国本土で働いており、Taobaoでショッピングをしています。Alipayが台湾人に多く利用されているのはそのためです。
「台湾人を含む多くの海外の中国人はTaobaoでショッピングを始めています。さらに、中国本土で働き、Taobaoでショッピングする台湾人も多い。それがAlipayが台湾の人々の間で非常に人気がある理由です。」
Besides providing online shopping payments, Alipay also supports peer-to-peer money transfers, pay utility bills, credit cards, cable TV subscription bills – all of which make it quite a convenient online payment solution to have in greater China.
On a related note, its main rivals include Tencent’s Tenpay – which yesterday added support for social payments on its WeChat app.