China’s Credit Card Disappearance?

Image Source: Getty Images
China has somehow forgone the credit card era and went straight to mobile payments.
This is largely due to China going through a huge and sudden burst of economic development over the recent decades.
Credit cards were never able to gain a strong foothold in the Chinese payment market before mobile payment appeared.
The Trend

Data Source: IPSOS, WalktheChat
As we can see from the figure above, in 7 short years, mobile payments went from having less than 5% of the payment market share to controlling over 80% of the market.
Mobile payment penetration in large cities reach over 80%. In rural areas, we are still seeing approx. 66.5% mobile payment penetration. This is truly insane!
People normally living in rural areas that wouldn’t even know what credit cards are, are using mobile payments.

Data Source: eMarketer

Data Source: Payment & Clearing Association of China
China leads the Asia-Pacific nations in terms of mobile payment penetration, by quite a bit.
And in China, Alipay and WeChat Pay dominate this market segment, also by quite a bit.
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