A rising number of Chinese companies are offering their latest products, hoping to tap into the potentially massive mobile payments market, especially in wearable devices with payment function, the China Daily reported.
According to the report, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is the latest to join into the growing trend as it unveiled on Thursday, Oct. 15, its first smartwatch device that features a mobile payment function.
The report said that Pay Watch was co-developed by YunOS, the operating system of Aliyun platform and Fiismart Inc., a smart device maker based in Shenzhen in Guandong Province.
The launching of the device was led by Gu Zhicheng, who headed the product's development at YunOS, marking the official entry of the Alibaba operating system's venture into the wearable devices sector.
Gu explained that the new device can generate a quick response code that allows users to make payments anywhere, even when they are not connected to the Internet.
The report added that the Pay Watch, like Apple Inc's iWatch, can also track users' daily activity and allow them to receive phone calls and short messages from mobile networking apps and respond to notifications.
"For example, when you go out for a run and it is not convenient to carry your smartphone or wallet, you can wear the watch and use it to buy a drink after running," Xiao Ming, one of the watch's designers at Fiismart, said.
The payment function for the device is made possible through Alipay, China's leading third-party online payment provider, and can only be used to make payments in Alipay's tens of thousands of partner stores across China.
Lakala Payment Co. Ltd., Alipay's competitor, also launched last month its smart wrist-band featuring a payment function.
Hao Zhujing, an analyst with Internet Consultancy Analysys International, however, said that smartwatches have to meet the tough demands from smart devices users.
"But companies are still launching smartwatch products with payment functions because of the potential size of China's mobile payment market, which is expecting explosive growth," Hao said.
In the second quarter of this year, Analysys statistics showed that mobile payments overtook Internet-based payments in terms of transaction volume, reaching 3.475 trillion yuan ($547.9 billion).
In addition, Pay Watch's production was partly funded using Taobao's online crowdfunding platform, which has raised more than 7 million yuan since Sept. 22 from 34,000 individual investors.