Walmart shakes up Chinese m-payments market

Walmart is ditching Alibaba’s Alipay offering and switching to Tencent’s WeChat Pay for all its stores in the western part of China.

Walmart, which along with Carrefour is among the biggest foreign retailers in China, has been accepting Alipay in its more than 400 stores in the country. A company spokesperson declined to comment on the decision to jump to WeChat Pay in western China, observing: “In the future, we will cooperate with more partners to provide payment solutions with more convenience and benefits."

For Alibaba, losing Walmart is a major blow. It occupies first place in the Chinese mobile payments market, but Tencent is hot on its heels. Pony Ma, Chairman and Chief Executive at Tencent, recently said that his company was playing the long game here. “We want to nurture mobile payment into a very good basis so that our partners and users can utilise [them]” he commented.