There’s been a lot of talk about how mobile payments are on the rise in China and now statistics from the People’s Bank of China have shed some light on how huge the industry is. In 2013, the central bank handled a total of 16.74 million mobile payment transactions worth a whopping $1.6 trillion, according to the latest statistics. In an indication of the skyrocketing popularity of mobile payments in China, the number of transactions soared 213 percent year-on-year while the transaction value leaped by 317 percent.
In 2013, mobile payments were the fastest-growing form of payments in China, thanks to participation from banks and a huge explosion in peer-to-peer mobile payments. The Chinese mobile payment industry rocketed 317.56 percent year-over-year to 9.64 trillion yuan ($1.59 trillion) in 2013, while the number of orders hiked 212.86 percent year-over-year to 1.67 billion, according to the bank-level data released by Chinese central bank People’s Bank of China. The e-payments business grew rapidly in 2013, recording 25.78 billion orders and a total volume of 1,075 trillion yuan, up 27.40 percent and 29.46 percent respectively from a year earlier. E-payments include three categories of payment services: online payment, phone payment, and mobile payment.