A man uses his mobile phone outside PBOC headquarters. (Photo : Reuters)
After Tencent Holdings shut down Alibaba Group's financial arm in the period leading up to the Spring Festival by disabling the compatibility of Alipay's red envelope app on its enormously popular WeChat social network, Jack Ma's e-commerce giant has projected its focus beyond the borders of its native marketplace.
The shrewd marketing maneuver, which will reward overseas shoppers with discounts that could be as high as 50 percent, is in addition to the red envelopes containing 600 million yuan that Alipay is offering lucky customers.
In its Tuesday announcement, Alipay said that the discounts will be available to customers who travel to South Korea, Thailand and Singapore--where the brick-and-mortar outlets of its partners are located--during the Spring Festival period.
In line with expectations, the number of partners that Alipay can enlist is considerable, and Chinese customers will be able to choose from around 200,000 shops, supermarkets and restaurants from Feb. 18.
Analysts are not surprised by the nature of Alibaba's pivot and Wang Weidong, who is with iResearch Consulting Group, said:
"It is very difficult for Alipay to compete with Tencent in the red envelope campaign, because the whole scheme is a social game, encouraging people to send and share red envelopes with their online friends."
Wang's comment was in reference to the 450 million WeChat users who make up its monthly active user base, and the fact that Alibaba is not prominent in social media at this point in time.
Analysts observed that the involvement of overseas shops and vendors shows Alipay taking advantage of its own resources so that it does not compete in a head-on manner with Tencent.
