LinQpay and IPS have just announced a China M-Payment Joint Venture.
This new joint venture is a major move by IPS to increase its competitive edge in China's growing payment market. Although one of the only few profitable payment providers in China, IPS's 1.5 million strong user base is dwarfed compared to its competition: Alipay with 50+ million, Tenpay with 25+ million, and YeePay with 10+ million.
Even though Apple has yet to be officially released its iPhone for sale in China, iPhone-related news continues to domnate handset discussions here in Beijing. We have reported in the past that iPhones were widely available in China by way of parallel imports (or grey market); more recently, iPhones have made the headlines when it was announced that that Apple will NOT cooperate with local mobile giant, China Mobile. Our very own, Dave Carini, was quoted by BusinessWeek in the article "Apple Loses a Big One in China ".
This non-deal (that has since become a headline) should not be surprising to those who are familiar with both China Mobile and Apple.
Over the past ten years, the mobile phone has become as indispensable for many as the wallet - one simply doesn't leave home without it. At the same time, the phone has absorbed the functionality of a number of accessories and gadgets, from the old-fashioned (address book, wristwatch) to the modern (digital camera, music player). In the coming years, the mobile handset will likely resemble a mobile version of the computer: a fully customizable super-gadget with thousands of software-based applications.
The wallet, however, is one real-world accessory that has proven harder to transfer onto the handset.
Over the next few weeks we will cover Mobile Top-up and M-Payment Adoption in China. This series will take a closer look at mobile top-up, a service which allows users to pay their phone bills through the phone itself. We will identify the factors currently hindering m-payment growth in China and show how top-up may just be the "killer-app" that introduces m-payment to China's 500 million mobile users and breaks open the door for all m-payment companies.
