WeChat Pay and Alipay in Germany

 

In China, mobile or virtual applications are popular: according to a survey conducted on behalf of CoreMedia*, more than half of 3,000 persons interviewed in China, Germany and the USA believe that, ten years from now at the latest, the fitting of clothes with the aid of Virtual Reality will be standard procedure. Moreover, the majority of the Chinese assume that they soon will be able to virtually walk through a shop, while only 28 percent of the Germans share this forecast.

Mobile payment pioneers
China is the global trendsetter in mobile payment services. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, 95.5 percent of the Chinese possess a smartphone. In Germany this is true of only three quarters of consumers. In the metropolises of the People's Republic
companies virtually have divided the market between themselves: Alipay, supported by commercial giant Alibaba, most recently had more than 520 million users and a market share of about 60 percent. Competitor WeChat Pay, which belongs to the biggest Chinese internet company, Tencent, holds the remaining 40 percent and boasts more than 600 million users with its application.

WeChat Pay for Chinese tourists
The China correspondent of Handelsblatt, Stephan Scheuer, reports that nearly a billion Chinese now also can make purchases in Europe with these services. German provider Wirecard and payment processor Stripe make this possible. Paypal competitor Stripe has entered into a partnership with the two leading Chinese payment services, Alipay and WeChat Pay. Hundreds of millions of customers from the People's Republic thus are able to shop at global companies using the established mobile financial apps, as announced by the start-up from Silicon Valley. Stripe began operating in Germany in spring of this year.

C-star: global meeting of retail experts
At the C-star show from 26 to 28 April 2018 in Shanghai, a spin-off of EuroShop focussing on the Chinese market, information technology in retail is one of the key issues. International service providers and manufacturers will be presenting their innovations in this field.

*Survey of 3,000 persons in China, Germany and the USA on behalf of CoreMedia, which asked consumers in the three countries how they think online retail will be like in ten years.
 
Contact
Ute Holtmann, EHI, Head of Public Relations, Tel.: 02 21/5 79 93-42, holtmann@ehi.org

Publisher
EHI Retail Institute e. V., Spichernstraße 55, 50672 Köln, www.ehi.org, Tel.: +49 (0)2 21/5 79 93-0, Fax: -45

About EHI
The EHI Retail Institute is a research and consultancy institute for the retail industry and its partners, with around 60 employees. The international EHI network comprises some 800 member companies from the retail, consumer goods and capital goods industries, along with service providers. EHI gathers key performance indicators for brick-and-mortar and online retail, identifies trends and works out solutions. The company was founded in 1951. Its president is Götz W. Werner. The managing director is Michael Gerling. GS1 Germany is a subsidiary of EHI and the German Brand Association and coordinates the allocation of Global Trading Item Numbers (GTIN, formerly EAN) in Germany. In cooperation with EHI, Messe Dusseldorf hosts EuroShop, the world's leading capital goods trade fair for the retail industry, EuroCIS, where the latest products, solutions and trends in IT and security technology are presented, and C-star in Shanghai for the Asian retail industry.
 
 
Rest: According to a BCG study, though China has bid farewell to turbo growth, annual economic growth of 5.5 percent would mean the market for consumer goods still is going to grow by a total of 1.8 trillion dollars to 6.1 trillion dollars in the year 2021.