Right now the competition in the mobile payments scene is pretty fierce. We have established players like PayPal who have been operating for quite a while now, and we also have new players in the market like Apple with Apple Pay, Google with Android Pay, and Samsung with Samsung Pay.
For the most part a lot of them work the same way, so the issue here is how many markets they can cover in order to become the accepted standard. So far Apple Pay has been a bit slow in terms of rolling out to non-US markets, but they have recently announced that they will be available in both Australia and Canada (in addition to the US and UK), and it looks like Samsung has no plans to be left in the dust.
According to a report from SamMobile, they have learnt that Samsung is apparently gearing up to launch Samsung Pay in countries such as China, Spain, and the UK come Q1 2016. As it stands, Samsung Pay is available in South Korea and the US and last we heard, they had managed to net 1 million subscribers in South Korea alone which is an impressive feat.
This means that if they were to expand to those countries, the number of markets they cover would be more than Apple, giving them an advantage. However the downside is that for now, Samsung Pay is only limited to the company’s high-end flagships, so we can only imagine if they were to open it up to non-Samsung devices, how many more subscribers they could get.
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