How PayPal Plans To Find Ground In China's Payments Market Dominated By Alibaba, WeChat Parent Tencent

PayPal Holdings Inc PYPL is planning to launch a local wallet in China that will focus on cross-border payments, CNBC reported on Monday citing Hannah Qiu, the China CEO for PayPal.

What Happened: Qiu told CNBC that the U.S. fintech company is planning to launch a domestic wallet in China that will not compete with the dominant local players such as Alipay and WeChat Pay for domestic payments but will focus on cross-border payments. 

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Qiu revealed the plan at a panel session hosted by CNBC at the Boao Forum for Asia in the province of Hainan in China.

In January this year, the U.S. fintech company became the first foreign firm to have 100% control of a payment platform in China by acquiring a 30% stake it did not already own in GoPay. But until now, PayPal has been quiet on its plans.  

“Our future business is mainly on cross-border transactions. Our value is more from overseas. In our overseas market, there are over 377 million individual users and over 20 million corporate users,” Qiu told CNBC.

The China mobile payment market is dominated by Tencent Holdings’ TCEHY WeChat and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA affiliate Ant Group that runs Alipay. These apps allow users to pay online or in stores. At physical stores, users show a barcode that the merchant scans to take a payment. PayPal will not be competing with these two services. 

Price Action: PayPal shares closed 0.73% lower at $267.91 on Monday.

Photo: Courtesy of PayPal