Alipay active users exceeding 900 million across the globe

The 2018 annual report for China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, which was released on Wednesday, revealed that together with its e-wallet partners, Alipay now serves over 900 million users globally.

In September, Eric Jing, Ant Financial’s executive chairman and CEO, said at Alibaba’s Investor Day in Hangzhou that the number of domestic active users of Alipay had already reached 700 million, having grown from 520 million at the end of 2017.

In its annual report, Ant Financial said that Alipay’s strong performance over the past year in the consumer market was because of the company’s determined efforts to increase the number of active users. Although the company suffered a 352 million U.S. dollar loss during the first three quarters of this year, it was working to add new services to its Alipay platform, which led to the expansion of its market both at home and overseas.

The use of payment apps like Alipay and its main competitor WeChat Pay have boomed in China in recent years. It’s said that more than 40 million stores across China now offer payment options for these apps, and more and more stores overseas are taking up this technology in order to cater to the needs of a growing numbers of Chinese tourists.