China fact of the day

WeChat had more mobile transactions over just Chinese New Year than PayPal had during 2015…

According to WeChat, owned by digital media business Tencent, 420 million people sent each other lucky money via the app’s payment service on the eve of Chinese New Year. According to WeChat, it has seen a total of 8.08 billion red envelopes sent so far for Chinese New Year, eight times more than last year.

To put this into context, according to PayPal it made 4.9 billion transactions in 2015 (half of the number of transactions made on WeChat just for Chinese New Year) and only 28 per cent were made on a mobile device.

Here is the article, hat tip goes to Erik Brynjolfsson.  Do not underestimate the potential for Chinese innovation in information technology!