Samsung and Alibaba announce that Samsung Pay will work with Alipay
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung built its wallet on acquired MST technology from the LoopPay acquisition, then fought for China access through parallel UnionPay agreements with Apple before launching Samsung Pay in China with UnionPay in March 2016.
Two months into that launch, the Alipay tie-up adds a second, domestically dominant rail alongside UnionPay — the first sign that Samsung treats China not as one market but as several payment networks it must bridge.
First-order effects
- Chinese Samsung Pay users gain access to merchants inside Alipay's acceptance network without abandoning their wallet app, materially widening where the phone can pay two months after launch.
Second-order effects
- Apple, which entered China solely through the same UnionPay agreement, now faces a rival whose wallet spans both card rails and Alipay's merchant base — raising the bar for any competing foreign wallet in the country.
Third-order effects
- The pattern repeats stateside when Samsung rolls out PayPal support in 2018, pointing toward wallets becoming aggregators of multiple local payment schemes rather than single-network services, with competition shifting from tap infrastructure to acceptance coverage.
The trend: Smartphone payment wallets are evolving from proprietary single-network apps into interoperable aggregators that stitch together whatever local rails dominate each market.