Category: Featured News

Samsung Pay will be launching in China soon

Samsung is planning to launch its first mobile payments service, called Samsung Pay, in China this week. The company is set to compete with Apple, which has only very recently brought its own payment service to the country. Unlike Apple, however, Samsung may have a relatively easy time engage consumers with its new service. Jefferies, a global investment bank, believes that Samsung will find success in the Chinese market, which has become heavily involved in mobile commerce in recent years.

Analysts see Samsung Pay finding more success among consumers than Apple Pay

Jefferies equity analyst Johnny Wong Kin-man believes that there will be less fanfare surrounding the launch of Samsung Pay, but it will likely be more accepted among merchants than Apple Pay. Apple has had trouble ensuring the launch of its payment service in China, where banks had shown relatively little interest in the service. Banks had shown concern that Apple was attempting to take advantage of the mobile commerce ecosystem that they have already established. Apple has since acquired the support of several banks, many of whom see a great deal of promise in the mobile payments space.

Samsung Pay could become a universally accepted payment platform

Samsung Pay has already proven to be extremely popular among merchants. Samsung predicts that as many as 30 million merchant locations throughout the world will accept the new payment service in the near future. This would make Samsung Pay the world’s first mobile commerce solution that has near universal acceptance. In China, Samsung Pay may become quite popular among consumers that have become reliant on their mobile devices while shopping.

Samsung will face significant competition from Alibaba and Tencent

While Samsung may be able to find more success than Apple, it will face major competition from other companies that have become involved in mobile payments. Both Alibaba and Tencent have established major footholds in the mobile space, with consumers using the platforms these companies have develop to purchase products online and send money to one another.

By the year 2020, CCS Insight is predicting that there will be 411 million wearables owned by consumers.

Analyst firm, CCS Insight has now give its wearable technology outlook an update, now predicting that by 2020, there will be 411 million smart wearable technology devices owned by consumers, and that the industry will be worth a massive $34 billion.

The firm also stated that, by the close of 2016, the wearables industry will have broken the $14 billion mark.

The predictions that it has made is that wrist-based wearable technology devices, such as many fitness trackers and smartwatches, will continue to top the list among the most popular gadgets in the category. The forecast the analyst has issued has stated that wrist-worn wearables will make up half of all sales in this category in the upcoming 12 months. Moreover, smartwatches are expected to make up 50 percent of the predicted 60 million device shipments that it expects to occur during that time.

This wearable technology update has changed since mid-2015, showing a 41 percent market share for the Apple Watch.

At that time, it said that there would be 20 million Apple Watches sold in 2015. That said, its data has now shown that during that time, the figure was strikingly lower; at only 9 million device sales.

Previously in February, another firm, Canalys, had indicated that its estimates were that in 2015, there were 12 million Apple Watches shipped. If that firm’s claims are true, that would give the company a much larger share, at about two thirds of the smartwatch marketplace. On the other hand, a week after that, Gartner released its figures and said that in 2015, the total number of smartwatch sales from all brands was 30 million. These varying numbers and measures make it evident that knowing what has already happened may be just as difficult to measure as predicting what will be occurring a few years down the road.

According to CCS Insight chief of research, Ben Wood, when discussing the wearable technology forecast report, “Given the rising consumer apathy toward smartphones, it is little wonder so many companies are chasing the rapidly growing opportunity presented by wearables. We’re particularly excited about the potential for augmented and virtual reality devices, and we predict 2016 will be a pivotal year.”