Alipay releases 10-year reconciliation statement: "Small city" phenomenon reflects consumption trends

On December 8, Alipay, a subsidiary of Ant Financial, released its 10-year statement. In addition to expressing their feelings about the past decade of "spending" and "spending money" and the social fun brought by the "2024 Rich List", the statement also indirectly reflects the changes in China's economy and consumers' online payment habits over the past decade, becoming a barometer of the Internet economy.

Mobile payments in the western region lead the nation

With the convenience of mobile phones, the western region is overtaking the eastern region in the field of mobile payments.

In the ranking of the proportion of mobile payment transactions in various provinces in 2014, Tibet, Shaanxi, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia occupied the top four places, accounting for 62.2%, 59.6%, 58.3% and 57.6% respectively. In contrast, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong ranked only 29th, 24th and 27th among the 34 provincial administrative divisions in China, which is a little surprising.

"As early as three or four years ago, the western region was leading in the ranking of mobile payment share, and we were very surprised at the time." An internal source of Alipay told the reporter of "China Business Daily" that Tibet also ranked first in the number of mobile payments that year. The company initially thought that more and more people traveling to Tibet were using mobile phones to pay locally, but later more convincing reasons explained this phenomenon.

According to the person, one reason is closely related to the general background of China's economic trends. A few years ago, the penetration rate of personal computers in the western region was relatively low. However, with the advent of the mobile Internet era, smartphones (lower in price than PCs), as necessities of life, have spread across the country. The convenience of mobile payments and transfers has allowed the west to catch up in the new round of informatization. Another reason is that the overall online payment base in developed regions such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is huge, which means that the large denominator has lowered the proportion of mobile payments.

Analysts believe that the new wave of informatization brought about by mobile Internet is narrowing the gap between China's remote areas and the world. The western region, which jumped directly into the era of mobile Internet, has gained a latecomer advantage because of the lower cost of replacing information infrastructure.

On the "Double 11" day this year, Alipay completed 197 million mobile payments, breaking the global record again. A powerful data shows that in 2014, in all provinces in the mainland, Alipay mobile payments accounted for more than 50% of the total payments, and the trend of future consumption habits has been clearly revealed.

The reporter noticed that Alibaba Group COO Zhang Yong recently shared a set of figures about rural e-commerce with the media, which showed that the average age of rural online shoppers is concentrated between 20 and 29, which is younger than that of urban online shoppers; and the proportion of rural users using mobile phones to access the Internet has reached 84.6%, 5 percentage points higher than that of urban areas. These figures have brought to light the huge potential of mobile online shopping and payment in western and rural areas.

In fact, the "small town phenomenon" has been clearly reflected in the county economy. In the 2014 payment map, there were 66 counties with per capita online spending exceeding 20,000 yuan. Yiwu, Yongkang, Gaobeidian and other counties were among the top 100 payment counties in 2014, and the wealth vitality of small counties was demonstrated.

Online payment accelerates the “de-online shopping”

Another trend reflected in the ten-year reconciliation statement is that Alipay is expanding from a simple online shopping payment tool to an indispensable service platform involving transfers, financial management, public utility bill payments, air travel, movies and other areas of life. The online payment function is accelerating the "de-online shopping" and breaking away from the role of simply serving online shopping.

Industry insiders have analyzed that in the O2O era where online services and offline businesses are integrating rapidly, online payment, as an indispensable part of this closed loop, is incorporating more and more offline resources into the online payment ecosystem, while also tying people's daily lives and online payments more closely.

When the Alipay bill payment function was launched in 2008, the average number of bill payments per person per year was 2.17. Six years later, this number has risen to 5.96. The number of credit card repayments made using Alipay has increased from 3.39 per person five years ago to 12.26 per person per year now.

According to the bank statement statistics, the total number of transactions for the four major convenience payment methods, including bill payments, credit card repayments, mobile phone top-ups, and transfers, was about 6 billion from 2004 to 2014. If each transaction can save users 10 minutes of time going out or queuing, and the cost of queuing each time is 4 yuan, then the value of these convenience payments will be more than 20 billion yuan.

A set of latest statistics from Analysys International shows that in the third quarter of 2014, the transaction volume of mobile payment (excluding SMS payment) in China's third-party payment market reached 2053.3 billion, with a month-on-month growth rate of 25.6%. Among them, Alipay Wallet accounted for 79.26%, ranking first; Lakala and Tenpay ranked second and third with 7.49% and 7.37% respectively. A figure worth noting is that nearly 50% of the transaction volume of Alipay Wallet mobile terminal was contributed by transfers and credit card repayments.

According to statistics, since the launch of Alipay in 2004, the number of online payments made by the Chinese people has reached 42.3 billion in the past ten years. In a horizontal comparison of the total payment amount, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Beijing and Jiangsu are firmly in the top five, accounting for 15.5%, 12.5%, 9.3%, 9% and 8.8% respectively. In fact, this combination has remained stable in the past two years.

In addition, the post-90s generation has begun to play a leading role in the online economic life. Among the total number of Alipay users, this group accounts for more than 30%, and is also the second largest group after the post-80s generation in subscribing to Yu'ebao for money fund management.