Samsung Pay continues to expand across the globe. Samsung’s mobile payment service is now officially available in China for Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6 edge+ plus and Note 5 users.
Samsung, together with China UnionPay (CUP), announced on Tuesday, March 29 that it is rolling out Samsung Pay in China in a bid to “provide greater flexibility, access, and choice for customers.”
“We are pleased to be partnering with CUP to bring Samsung Pay to China,” said Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President and Head of R&D, Software and Services of Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “The reception of Samsung Pay since its launch has been extremely positive and the service has already seen tremendous success in terms of availability and adoption by consumers.”
Rhee went on to say that Samsung wants to make this mobile payment service available to as many customers as possible in the country so they are able to benefit from the safety, simplicity and expediency this mobile solution has to offer.
At the moment, Samsung Pay supports certain debit and credit cards from nine partner banks. These banks include China Everbright Bank, China Citic Bank, China Merchants Bank, China Guangfa Bank, China Construction Bank, China Minsheng Banking Corp. Ltd., Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Ping An Bank and Hua Xia Bank.
Samsung says it will include future support for the debit and credit cards of six more banks sooner or later.
The arrival of Samsung Pay in China comes hot on the heels of the launch of its arch rival Apple Pay in China.
This means that Apple Pay and Samsung Pay will go head-to-head with Tencent's WeChat Payment and Ant Financial’s Alipay that are currently governing the market.
Apple Pay initially became available for consumers of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s biggest lender by assets, along with 19 other Chinese lenders.
WeChat Payment and Alipay today are increasingly gaining traction in the country, especially after introducing the digital red envelope functionality. During the Chinese Lunar New Year, Tencent was able to process 32.1 billion red envelopes from 516 million users through its WeChat Payment platform. Alipay, in the meantime, managed to process 800 million yuan ($122 million USD) worth of digital red envelopes from 400 million users.
This implies that Samsung Pay may also have a hard time entering the Chinese market governed by these two big mobile payments services in addition to the recently-rolled out Apple Pay.
