Alipay claims to be world's No 1 mobile payment company

HANGZHOU - Alipay, a leading Chinese third-party payment platform, announced Saturday it has become the largest mobile payment provider in the world.

The company claims the title based on number of users and transaction volume.

At the end of 2013, the company, a subsidiary of Internet firm Alibaba Group, had nearly 300 million registered users, including over 100 million who access services via mobile phones, according to statistics released by Alipay.

The data shows that during last year, the company's mobile users made 2.78 billion transactions, with volume reaching 900 billion yuan ($148 billion).

In November and December, an average 12 million payments were made through Alipay's mobile services every day and the number has shot up to 18 million since the beginning of this year, according to the company.

Alipay said its active mobile usership has trumped that of its US counterpart Paypal since the second quarter last year.

By the end of 2013, 500 million Chinese people were accessing the Internet via mobile phones, accounting for 81 percent of the country's netizen population, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.