Samsung will soon take Samsung Pay to the shores of China, hot on the heels of Apple Pay.
The South Korean company's mobile payment solution was well-received in South Korea and the United States, where about 5 million users reportedly made about $500 million worth of transactions six months after it rolled out.
"We've already seen significant consumer adoption and we continue to see great momentum. Our aim is to expand Samsung Pay to even more locations around the world, and our customers should expect to see more features in the year to come," Injong Rhee, executive vice president and head of research and development at Samsung, says.
With that said, the big question of whether Samsung Pay will be bigger than Apple Pay still remains.
To start things off, Samsung Pay is slated to go live in China sometime in March. The company will soon extend the service to Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Spain and the UK within 2016, keeping Canada as part of its launch roadmap.
On the other hand, Apple Pay has debuted in China, officially making it the fifth country to support the Cupertino brand's mobile payment system.
However, Apple Pay didn't exactly get off on the right foot at launch, where plenty of users weren't able to sign up or connect their cards to their accounts.
An Apple spokesperson tells Mashable that the reason for the issue is that the company is launching the service on a "rolling basis." There was no mention about whether this implementation is to ensure that Apple can handle the number of sign-ups.
Despite the real cause, as opposed to the speculated overload of sign-ups, some users still encountered some trouble in registering.
"It kept telling me the phone 'cannot connect to Apple Pay' or the verification for the card is not available when I was linking a bankcard," Duan Ge, a user that Chinese news website Caixin Online cited, says, noting that he "could not even open the app."
The issue did not hinder the progress of Apple Pay in the country, though. After an hour of going live, about 10 million users have already linked their cards to the service, according to the Beijing Morning News. By 5:00 p.m. local time, roughly 38 million cards have been registered.
Now, Samsung is ready to take on the Chinese market, supporting four major payment networks: American Express, China UnionPay, MasterCard and Visa. On top of that, the company will certainly have an audience there, and perhaps it could learn a thing or two from what happened with Apple and make a better launch.
Of course, the two will have to go toe-to-toe with Alipay, the leading mobile payment service in China with 400 million users, but that's a whole different story.
To boil things down, Samsung Pay has the potential to be as hot as Apple Pay as long as the South Korean company gets things off the ground smoothly, but at any rate, it would be interesting to see who will come out on top in the mobile payment game in China.
