PayPal has revealed its plans to set up a local wallet for cross-border payments in China. The company said it would not be competing with the dominant players in the country.
Online payments company PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL) is planning to launch a local wallet in China. PayPal is now a fintech giant in China, becoming the first foreign firm with 100% ownership of a payments service in the country. The company has not mentioned details on its plans until recently.
PayPal China CEO Reveals Plans on New Local Wallet
PayPal China CEO, Hannah Qiu, revealed the company’s plans in a panel session conducted by CNBC at the Boao Forum for Asia in the province of Hainan in China. According to Qiu, PayPal intends to launch a domestic wallet for its users in China. However, PayPal will not compete with other payment giants like Alipay and WeChat Pay in China.
WeChat Pay and Alipay are the key players dominating China’s domestic mobile payments market. Users make online payments with these apps, in and outside of stores. When present in physical stores, users of these apps make payments by showing merchants a barcode to scan. On the other hand, PayPal’s domestic wallet in China will instead focus on cross-border payments. Qiu stated that PayPal will not compete with either WeChat pay or AliPay.
CNBC’s translation of Qiu statement in Mandarin goes thus:
“Our future business is mainly on cross-border transaction. Our value is more from overseas. In our overseas market, there are over 377 million individual users and over 20 million corporate users. We have a large network of such users. Thus, what we need to do is to build a bridge, bridging good Chinese products overseas and taking good overseas products back to China.”
Speaking further, the CEO commented on PayPal not competing with other key players in the country.
“I’m not listing the companies’ names, but we have very deep cooperation with some local companies,” said he.
PayPal Sees Constant Gains
PayPal has continuously made headlines over the past months. In October, the company announced that users can now buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies on the platform. The online payment provider said that it will initially support Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Following PayPal’s announcement to support digital assets, Bitcoin surged in its value, followed by altcoins. Since then, Bitcoin has been rising, recording more than 6000% gains in the last 12 months.
As several cryptocurrencies jumped over the past months, PayPal has also been growing over the past year. PayPal stock has added 149.13% in the last one year, advancing further by over 4% in its year-to-date record. In the last three months, PayPal stock has upped 8.36% and jumped nearly 10% over the past month. Despite the increases, the company has dropped 2.73% in the last five days.
PayPal stock is currently at premarket trading of $266.32, a 0.12% loss from its previous close of $267.91.
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