The rapid adoption of digital payment systems continues to transform Chinese economy and society in unprecedented ways. Nowadays, handling cash seems like a thing of the past with nearly everyone in China using one of the two main payment systems: AliPay or WeChat Pay.

When is comes to digital payments, China is, undoubtedly, the technological leader. Once Chinese payment systems have become the primary payment method online, brick-and-mortar stores started to adopt them for offline payments as well.

Today, practically every business in China, big or small, finds it much more convenient to settle bills via AliPay or WeChat Pay compared to traditional cash.

Several factors are responsible for such universal adoption of digital payments in China. The fact that it is backed by ecommerce giants such as Alibaba and the top tech innovator, Tencent, was the most critical component. Also, as it turns out, having digital cash is a much safer way to handle money in China – it is harder to lose, there is no problem with fake bills and there is almost always a recourse to get money back in case of a fraudulent transaction.

Another big reason for wide adoption of digital payments in China is the fact that those platforms integrate seamlessly with a bank accounts using real name authentication. This is another reason why the fraud with those system is rare and much harder for criminals to pull off (although it does happen).

Two if the largest Chinese payment systems are AliPay, backed by Alibaba and WeChat Pay, introduced by WeChat maker Tencent. Although, WeChat Pay was a relative late comer, it quickly catches up with AliPay in terms of market share.

In fact, most Chinese have both AliPay and WeChat Pay wallets and use them interchangeably. Other payment systems platforms have sprung up as well, achieving a fare amount of success, although nothing on the magnitude of AliPay or WeChat Pay.

QQ Wallet is a system used by QQ, an ecosystem of apps and digital products by the same Tencent. Baidu has it’s own system called Baidu Wallet which was launched even earlier then WeChat Pay.

Out of non-Chinese payment systems, only ApplePay has reached some degree of recognition, although it enjoys much less popularity. Since it uses NFC technology, it often cannot be used with more popular Android phones. QR code based Chinese payment systems of AliPay and WeChat Pay are much more flexible as they don’t require any special reading devices besides a simple camera.

AmazonPay, PayPal and others remain relatively unknown and are unlikely to gain any meaningful market share in China. One of the issues with those platforms are high transaction fees when funds are withdrawn back to a bank account. AliPay and WeChat Pay don’t charge anything for the amounts that most people use them for (some fees start to kick off when a certain transaction limit is reached).

Here is the chart put together by Statista showing the market share of various Chinese payment systems:

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What is unique in China’s millennials who are born around 90’s is the their size – 211 million which is already 5 times larger than their US counterparts. Perhaps not surprisingly, they are also glued to their phones – 50% reported checking their cellphones every 15 minutes.

Social media is the main source information for 70% of Chinese millennials and they spend almost twice the time of Americans watching online videos.

Although Chinese and US millennials online behaviors are similar, the sites and platforms they are using are completely different – primarily due to the fact that all major Western social media platforms are blocked in the Mainland.

They are also big on online shopping and, primarily on mobile and they prefer branded products. Here is more on that.

Chinese millennials market and online behavior infographic

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Here are just some of the most impressive nuggets on what has happened on one minute on China Internet:

• Almost 400,000 people log in to WeChat app every minute;
• 625,000 Youku-Tudou videos are being watched;
• Almost 65,000 Weibo tweets with over 50,000 of them containing images;
• Over 4 million of Baidu search queries;
• $1.1 million is spent on Taobao or Tmall;

China Internet in 60 seconds:

(credit to TechInAsia)

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The trade war between two world’s biggest economies, the U.S. and China, is escalating. Since January 2018, we’ve seen rounds of tariffs, applied on various products, impacting negatively local businesses and their customers.

The automobile, tech and agriculture sectors are already suffering from the dispute. Companies manufacturing in China, like Apple or Tesla, are facing a price increase on raw materials which most possibly will result in higher prices of their products and eventually fewer buyers. American farmers report $11.8 billion loss in their personal incomes. Not to mention those, who went bankrupt after introducing the soybean tariff. What is going to happen next?

With the help of a infographic prepared by Trademachines.com you can get a visual insight into the subject, understand what tariffs are, and why Donald Trump turned into protectionism. This visual summary of the war traces back the initial motives of the trade dispute and gives you a timeline of the most relevant events.

US has now imposed new round tariffs on wide range of Chinese made goods worth USD 200 billion overall. China has retaliated with its own tariffs, albeit for only 60 billion.

Naturally, since the trade between the two countries is unbalanced in favor of China (the official pretext of this trade war) America has more opportunities to impose new tariffs on more good rather than China.

Huawei, China’s top tech giant and the world largest telecom equipment maker, has already become the latest casualty of this trade war. The first shots were fired with the arrest of Huawei CFO and the daughter of the founder, Meng Wangzhou.

US and many of its allies stopped doing business with this firm. This even included Google blocking Huawei’s access to its Andriod system updates and Play Store.

China has promised to retaliate and there is a growing popular sentiment aimed at boycotting US firms such as Apple.

Here is the infographic on US-China trade war

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Geographic distribution of China expat population

Most foreigners live in Guangdong, the richest Chinese province and the first one to lead Chinese economic development after the country started to open up in the late 70s.

Shanghai has the next largest expat population in China that stood at over 209,000 few years ago. It has most likely doubled since then. Beijing is the third largest population center for expats.

Top nationalities in China expat population

According to China-Briefing, South Koreans form the largest foreign community in China at 21% of the total. Large Korean conglomerates such as Samsung and LG have been setting up manufacturing facilities in China, bringing large number of employees to fill top management and key technical positions.

From non-Asian countries, Americans are the most numerous. Most of them have been posted by multinationals which are mostly in manufacturing, logistics and export business.

According to the research by InterNations, 18% of expats were sent to China by their employers and 17% came “for an adventure”. Although, China ranks quite low at the ease of settling down (not surprising given significant culture and language barriers), it scores near the top at personal finance criteria, despite steadily rising cost of living.

Overall, 76% of expats indicated general satisfaction about living in China and only 1% were extremely unhappy.

Air quality and health issues were among the most pressing concern of foreigners. Incidentally, healthcare has been the main area of dissatisfaction of local Chinese as well.

Most recent country report by InterNation breaks down China expat population in more details:

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Alibaba still dominates Chinese ecommerce with Taobao for C2C and Tmall for B2C. The other major player in B2C space is JD.com, currently this company holds about a quarter of the total market.

WeChat Weidian is another newcomer that is quickly gaining traction in Chinese m-commerce but it is not featured in this infographic due to lack of available data.

Other platforms in China ecommerce landscape are significantly smaller with market share in single digits. They also tend to be more specialized – for example, Suning and Gome mainly sell appliances and electronics while Vancle is a clothing branded retailer.

China ecommerce landscape

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Whether you are a small business, a mid-sized start-up, or a large organization, importing goods from China can offer you several benefits. For starters, their wide range of products guarantees you variety in your stock, including some products that you might not find in the local market. China is also known for producing quality goods at a much more affordable price. On top of that, China has reliable and fast freight services. Therefore, importing goods from China can save your business a lot of time and money, which you can focus towards other tasks such as marketing, promotion, rebranding, etc. It can also give you a competitive edge, thus boosting your business’ chances of succeeding.

However, despite all the benefits, it is not an easy task to import goods from China, especially if you are new to the practice. For starters, you must find reliable suppliers who can offer you a regular supply of quality goods – and this is not an easy feat. There are also several other challenges to deal with, including a complex, confusing, and expensive import process, extended transit times, fluctuating freight fees, unexpected delays, and others.

But with the right guidance, you can be able to source quality goods and make the import process smoother and efficient. Below are 8 tips on importing goods from China presented by Panda Paper Roll Company, which can guide you through the entire process.

8 tips on importing goods from China

About the Author:

Frank Ouyang is the chief manager and co-founder of Panda Paper Roll Company, a paper roll supplier and mobile payment solution provider. In addition to his love for paper industry, Frank is also dedicated to helping small business entrepreneurs to run better businesses. You can read more at the website: www.pandapaperroll.com.

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In the last few years, Chinese Singles’ Day or Guanggun Jie (光棍节) has become the biggest China shopping festival. This is the day when young people celebrate the fact of being single. The date, November 11th (11/11), is chosen because the number “1” resembles a single individual. This festival has become the largest offline and online shopping day in the world with ecommerce operators like Alibaba and JD (JingDong) reaching new heights every year.

This year was another record settings one. For example, during the festival, Alipay has registered processing 256,000 payment transactions per second, reaching unprecedented number of 1.48 billion transactions in 24 hours. Another remarkable fact is that 90% of purchases were done via mobile app rather then from PC.

The festival has also resonated globally with more participating locations outside of China than ever before. Alizila, the Alibaba news aggregation, listed top 5 Countries/Regions Selling Cross-Border to China by GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) were:

1. Japan
2. United States
3. Australia
4. Germany
5. Korea

Top 5 Countries/Regions Buying Cross-Border from China by GMV were:

1. Russia
2. Hong Kong
3. United States
4. Taiwan
5. Australia

Here is the infographic on the largest ecommerce platform, Alibaba, that the folks from Alizila have put together:

China shopping festival 11.11.2017 in numbers:

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In this post, we would like to share the latest infographic by WebsiteBuilder.org featuring over a hundred facts about email marketing and why it works.

The facts in this extensive infographics is grouped by various categories such as “stats by type of emails”, “most used email marketing techniques”, “psychology of email recipient”. There is a special section on mobile emails stats and spam, insight into reasons why people choose to unsubscribe, email engagement figures and more.

Before embarking on your next email marketing campaign, make sure to check out this infographic.

119 Facts About Email Marketing

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In this blog, we have covered extensively many aspects on Chinese email marketing: from deliverability issues to legal requirements and best practices for email template designs.  

The numbers in Webpower’s infographic provide further insight into who are the biggest users of email marketing in China as well as average performance metrics by the industry.

Overall, the figures appear to be more or less in line in what marketers usually see in other markets. Those numbers can also be quite useful in figuring out ROI of email marketing campaigns targeting China.

There is also some data on SMS marketing in China, although not as detailed as with emails. It is a bit surprising to find out that SMS marketing is making a come back after facing legal challenges in the last few years.

According to the report, airlines, financial services and retail and the biggest users of SMS marketing in China, probably, in part, due to the higher cost compared to email marketing. Here is the rest of the data:

Infographic: Email and SMS Marketing in China

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