![]() The industry consensus is that the two collectively control over 90% of China’s trillion-dollar electronic payments market where Alipay enjoys a slight lead.Īlipay processed 55.4% of China’s third-party payments transactions in the first quarter of 2020, according to market research firm iResearch, while another researcher Analysys said the firm’s share was 48.44% in the period. Tencent doesn’t disclose its payments transaction volume, but data from third-party research firms offer a hint of its scale. That’s about $17 trillion and dwarfs the $172 billion that PayPal handled in 2019. In the year ended June, Alipay processed a whopping 118 trillion yuan in payment transactions in China. Sources for the figures are companies’ quarterly reports, third-party research and TechCrunch estimates. With its cloud unit finishing the year at 17 billion yuan in revenue, we can venture to estimate that Tencent’s fintech products earned roughly or no more than 84 billion yuan ($12 billion), from the period - paled by Ant’s figure, but not bad for a relative latecomer.Īnt vs. The segment mainly consisted of fintech and cloud products, industry analysts told TechCrunch. In 2019, Tencent generated 101 billion yuan of revenue from its “fintech and business services. RevenueĪnt reported a total of 121 billion yuan or $17 billion in revenue last year, nearly doubling its sum from 2017 and putting it on par with PayPal at $17.8 billion. It’s unclear how many people tried Tencent’s other fintech products, though the firm did say about 200 million people used its wealth management service in 2019. As in the PayPal-eBay relationship, Alipay benefits tremendously by being the default payments processor for Alibaba marketplaces like Taobao.Īs of 2019, more than 800 million users and 50 million merchants used WeChat to pay monthly, a big chunk of the 1.2 billion active user base of the messenger. Among its 1 billion annual users, 729 million had transacted in at least one “financial service” through the platform. The Alipay app recorded 711 monthly active users and 80 million monthly merchants in June. In terms of user size, the rivals are going neck and neck. Will (should?) Tencent at some point follow in Alibaba’s footsteps to bring its own fintech operations under one umbrella? User number Screenshots of WeChat Pay inside Tencent’s WeChat messengerĪs such, we have pulled together estimates of Tencent’s fintech businesses ourselves using a mix of quarterly reports and third-party research - a mark of how un-transparent some of this really is - but it begs some interesting questions. In terms of digital finance, our way of working with and serving financial institutions, as well as our revenue model, are novel and do not have a counterpart,” the company noted in a somewhat hubristic reply. But the payments services offered by these companies are different from our digital payments and merchant services. “In the space of digital payments and merchant service, there are many players around the world, including Tencent’s WeChat Pay. In a reply to China’s securities regulator in September, the Jack Ma-controlled, Alibaba-backed fintech giant said it is “ not comparable” to WeChat Pay, the fintech tool inside WeChat, Tencent’s flagship messenger. Hidden businessĪnt refuted the comparison with Tencent or anyone else. However, when you tease out Tencent’s fintech activity across its wider footprint - from direct operations like WeChat Pay through to its sizeable strategic investments and third-party marketplaces - you have something comparable in size to Ant, and in some services even bigger. It’s somewhat complicated to do this, not least because they are sprawled across a number of Tencent properties and, unlike Ant, don’t go by a single brand or operational structure - at least, not one that is obvious to the outside world. As Ant Group seizes the world’s attention with its record initial public offering, which was abruptly called off by Beijing, investors and analysts are revisiting the fintech interests of Tencent, Ant’s arch rival in China.
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