Alibaba is Owning Mobile Payments

What was 2013’s most successful mobile payment company?

Hint: It wasn’t PayPal or Square.

That title belongs to Alipay, the payment arm of China’s Alibaba Group. The company reported on Saturday that they had 100 million users who made 2.78 billion mobile transactions.

The total value of transactions processed reached $148.43 billion dollars.

According to Alipay, these figures would put the company clearly above PayPal and Square’s combined mobile transaction volumes.

Alipay has 300 million registered users, which amounts to almost half of the 618 million population of total internet users in China.

Alibaba is very similar to eBay. Alibaba controls its own marketplace and payment method and it is so successful, there are estimates that 80 percent of China’s online shopping market runs through Alibaba.

Estimates from Macquarie Group place Alibaba at a valuation of up to $200 billion, which would plant Alibaba in the second spot behind Google in the list of the most valuable online companies.

More importantly, there are expectations that Alibaba will file an IPO in the near future that could amount to one of the largest since Facebook went public.