Alipay metrics

Increasingly it looks as though the Alipay system will sit at the heart of the Alibaba.com 'empire', providing the glue which knits together its various components. It's recently receiving a good deal of PR attention and we note with great interest the press release from last week releasing 2006 metrics.

Highlights:

• The number of registered Alipay users surpassed 33 million
• Alipay's daily transaction volume reached US$12.8 million
  (RMB100 million)
• The number of daily transactions using Alipay reached 460,000

The China Payment News blog, commenting on the story, also adds "Taobao's number of registered users rose to over 30 million by the end of 2006, a 116 per cent increase from 2005 and accounting for nearly all Internet users in China who say they shop online.".