Recent reports quote China Unionpay statistics stating China's mobile payment users grew to 19.2 million users in June. This came as somewhat of a surprise to us. In a report from April, China Unionpay's mobile payment subsidiary, UMPay, claimed over 40 million mobile payment users on its platform alone. According to other reports (1,2,3) in 2007, UMPay's mobile payment platform reached 50 million users. (UPDATE: UMPay's English website claims over 100 million users as of December 2008.) No one else seemed to question these numbers, and that tells us that the market knows not to take them too seriously. While we don't necessarily agree with the stereotype that statistics in China are useless, in this case the stereotype appears to be correct.
In researching China's mobile payment sector, we constantly deal with contradicting "statistics" and wildly varying definitions of what constitutes an m-payment user. In our recent Mobile Payment report and other published work, we try and make accurate estimates for users and other key metrics, and then move on to more important questions--which business models are working, who is making money, and how the market will evolve in the coming years.
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