BEIJING, Feb. 3 (Xinhua) -- China's third payment market have seen runners of many popular applications (apps) with enormous user flows rush to enter the sector since the beginning of 2021.
In mid January, Douyin, the Chinese version of popular short video app TikTok, launched Douyin Pay for in-app payment, and Pinduoduo, an interactive e-commerce platform in China, also applied for its payment trademark Pinduoduo Pay.
Apart from them, Kuaishou, another leading short video app and Bilibili, a popular short video sharing platform, also expedited their paces to seek fortune in the third party payment sector this year.
Analysts believed that these internet giants exploiting their user flows to frame their own payment systems represented the trend of the future, which would not only boost their user flow monetization, but also escalate competition in the third party payment sector.
Currently, Douyin Pay supports payment services bound with bankcards of ten banks including Bank of China, China Construction Bank and Agricultural Bank of China, other than Alipay and Wechat Pay already implanted in its app as payment options.
Prior to rollout of Douyin Pay, Douyin's parent company ByteDance had acquired an internet payment company named Wuhan Hezhong Epro Technology Co., Ltd. to obtain the third party payment license.
Wang Pengbo, senior financial analyst with Analysys, a big data based internet solution provider in China, said payment services could help more internet enterprises to expand their business links to develop new growth drivers and reserve transaction and client information to sustain their user flows.
For Douyin, it took the move to use the payment service as a channel to monetize its user flows including through live e-commerce and live shopping, held Wang, adding that connecting payment and shopping activities of users together would definitely create huge business potential.
However, the presence of the internet giants also hinted fiercer competition in the third party payment sector.
For many years, Alipay and Wechat Pay have been engaged in the mobile payment sector, resulting in currently existing duopoly. Statistics with TF Securities showed that Alipay and Tenpay, the underlying technology support provider of Wechat Pay, occupied respectively 54.93 percent and 38.98 percent of shares in China's mobile payment market by the end of 2019.
For the new market players, there was slim possibility for them to acquire too much market share from Alipay and Wechat Pay in the short term, but in sub-sectors that they are specialized in, their recent entering would be a start of change for the sector, Wang added. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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