Is Apple Pay on its way to China?

Apple is rumoured to have finally struck a deal with China UnionPay that will see a Chinese version of Apple Pay roll out in April.

 Kapron Asia cited a Bank of China-related Weibo post, which said that the full announcement will be heard in China in mid-April, and the service will launch on April 28th.

While mobile payments have become popular thanks to services such as Alipay, proximity payments using NFC have yet to really take off. But the technology to support NFC is ready to go, with over 4 million POS terminals in China already supporting UnionPay’s NFC-enabled Quickpass technology.

That’s a quarter of Chinese terminals, compared to the 2 per cent of merchants in the US who are ready for NFC. Apple also held about a quarter of the Chinese smartphone market in January 2015, the report said.

While there is a slight chance the launch could be delayed, kapron Asia added, it is moving in the right direction.

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