Chinese visitors prefer to pay with apps at CU

Nine out of 10 Chinese tourists at the convenience store CU used mobile apps to pay for their non-cash purchases, the company said Wednesday.

According to CU’s research, 87.2 percent of Chinese customers’ non-cash payments were made using payment apps. The other 12.8 percent were paid for using China UnionPay cards, which are promoted by the country’s state-run bank.

Mobile apps are a dominant means of payment in China, but Korea has been slower to adopt them. In 2016, only 35 percent of non-cash payments were done through apps, while UnionPay’s share was much larger at 65 percent. This was reversed last year when mobile pay apps took up 65.7 percent of payments, with cards at 34.3 percent.

CU said that usage of the apps skyrocketed after it started to accept WeChat Pay earlier this year.

By Song Kyoung-son