Nearly six weeks ago, Apple launcheed their mobile payment system, while following it a South Korea’s Samsung, announced the launch of its mobile payment service in China.
Samsung – Being world’s biggest smartphone market and world’s second largest economy also has a powerful market in China. For their mobile payment services, they have linked it with bank card provider Union Pay which gets further linked with the Central Bank. In comparison to other countries, China already has a well-established mobile payment system.
Being an outsider, it is really a great challenge for Samsung to compete with Apple as Apple also introduces its own Apple pay system in previous month having the same partnership with of Union Pay.
The South Korean electronics giant confirmed that their services are currently supported only few of the debit and credit cards out of the nine Chinese banks and is only applicable on the top-end Galaxy smartphones. As per the state-backed China Internet Network Information Center in the mid of 2015, China had 359 million online payment users which is quite 18% in six months.
As per the Beijing-based BigData Research, out of the e-commerce online payment providers, Alibaba ownely captures three-quarters of the market, followed by Tencent which is an operator of a well known popular messaging app, next comes the WeChat which has some 17 percent.
A major issue which Samsung is facing these days in China is the downturn in the popularity of their smartphones. In year 2012, Samsung was a top smartphone maker in 2012 and 2013 but afterwards Xiaomi has took the place in the year 2014. In the last year, Samsung ranked in sixth position in China along with a 7.0 percent market share in comparison to those of Apple having 13 percent of market share.
Besides all the above facts, it can’t be denied that Apple has its own brand command in China of being a status symbol for most of the emerging middle class people. So, the main question which arises here that will Samsung be able to complete with Apple by applying this step??