There’s been a lot of skepticism about Apple Pay’s prospects in Alipay-dominated China. But if Chinese media reports are to be believed, China’s Apple users are at least willing to try it out. According to Yicai, after the service finally went live Thursday morning, it was seeing rates of up to 80,000 cards added each minute in China.
That certainly sounds like a lot, but we don’t have any total card or user numbers, so take it with a grain of salt. And of course, users adding cards is just the first step anyway. What Apple really needs is for users to start paying with the service. But that could be a tough sell, given that other epayment services like Alipay sometimes offer discounts and are accepted at a wider variety of locations (at least for now).
Apple Pay does have a few tricks up its sleeve, though. It has partnered with virtually all of China’s big banks, and some of them are already offering promotions (like cashback rewards and discounts) to try to get users to adopt Apple’s new service. Those promotions are bank-specific, so you’d need to add their card to Apple Pay to take advantage, but it’s better than nothing. Whether it will be enough to tempt loyal users away from Alipay and WeChat is an open question, though.
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