China's mobile payment market to exceed $130b

BEIJING - More Chinese consumers are making payments via mobile devices and the size of the market is expected to exceed 800 billion yuan ($130.4 billion) this year, more than five times the volume in 2012, a report has revealed.

The report on online payment security, released by a research group headed by Ba Shusong, analyst with the Development Research Center of the State Council, described 2012 as the beginning of "a new era" for mobile payments.

Last year, 535 million payments were made through mobile phones with the transfer volume at 2.31 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 116 percent and 132 percent respectively, said the report.

In 2013, one third of transactions on Alipay, a major third-party payment service under Alibaba, were made through phones, a staggering jump of over 800 percent from a year earlier.

During the "Double Elevens (on November 11)" shopping spree, the Chinese version of Cyber Monday, the volume of payments on Alipay through phones totaled 535 million yuan, 5.6 times the amount made last year, earlier figures showed.

As the mobile Internet market is set for a boom, major Internet companies have been vying for a presence in the sector.

Wechat, China's most popular instant-messaging service developed by Tencent, had added a mobile payment service on the platform in August, and Baidu, China's leading search engine, followed by introducing its own mobile payment service -- Baidu Wallet SDK.