Apple watchers should expect the company’s mobile payment service, Apple Pay, to expand to new markets in 2016 — with a heavy emphasis on Asia.
According to a new report, Apple is focusing on Asia and Europe since adoption in the United States has been slower than expected. Regions set to get Apple Pay next year so far include China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain.
Apple hasn’t yet announced figures for its Apple Pay adoption, but an October estimate placed it at around 1 percent of payments.
While Apple reportedly saw its strongest Friday sales in history for this year’s Black Friday, another report also suggested that just half the total percentage of Apple customers who used Apple Pay at last year’s Black Friday took advantage of it during this year’s sales bonanza.
On the other hand, Not only is Asia a big market for Apple to focus on, but it is also a “mobile-first” market, where customers are more used to contactless payments. During last Sunday’s 60 Minutes episode, “Inside Apple,” Tim Cook reiterated that he sees China especially as Apple’s biggest market of the future.
Have you been a regular user of Apple Pay in 2015? Leave your comments below.
Source: Business Insider
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
One response to “Apple looks to Asia to speed Apple Pay growth in 2016”
Given that the use of Apple iPhones outside of the US is, proportionally, only a fraction of that in the US (worldwide, Apple’s iOS represents only ~14% of the smartphone market compared to Android’s ~83), why would Apple be able to do any better in Asia or Europe than it has (dismally) been able to do in the US?
In Australia (and Canada) the retail banks, apparently, aren’t interested in paying Apple a fee to allow Apple to better promote the sale of its new iPhones on the back of the banks’ existing payments systems; probably, they think that any payment, if there is to be one, should be going the other way.
Who cares anyway? Not even the Apple faithful, apparently; in the US, only ~5% of those Apple users that have had the opportunity to use Apple Pay, have done so; and on the latest Black Friday, the number was down to 2.7%; the figure is even less currently for payments via all Android OS phones (including the clunky PayPal Mobile).
Apple Pay—a proprietary solution to a payments problem that simply does not exist …