Samsung Electronics Co plans to expand its fledgling mobile payment service in the US next year, allowing users to shop online and with more smartphones that support the electronic wallet.
Lower-priced Samsung phones are likely to start offering the mobile wallet “within the next year,” Samsung Pay global co-general manager Thomas Ko said in an interview.
The service debuted in South Korea on just a handful of high-end Samsung phones, including the Galaxy Note 5, the Galaxy S6 Edge, the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge Plus.
Wider “handset availability of Samsung Pay as well as online payment support is coming soon,” Ko said late last week.
He did not comment on which other nations Samsung Pay would expand to.
Samsung Pay has already scored a lead over its major rivals Apple Inc and Android, by launching its US service on Sept. 28 with technology that is widely used at most stores. Apple Pay and Alphabet Inc’s Android Pay require retailers to install new equipment.
By accepting payments online, Samsung Pay is to compete with established rival PayPal Holdings Inc, as well as newcomers such as Visa Inc’s Visa Checkout.
Mobile wallets have struggled to find favor in the US, which has also been slower than Europe and Asia to adopt technologies such as credit cards embedded with microchips.
Samsung Pay is already the most widely accepted mobile wallet in the US because it is compatible with new and older credit card terminals and does not require any special arrangements with retailers, Ko said.
For instance, shoppers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc or Target Corp can pay by just waving their smartphones with the app.
By contrast, Apple Pay, launched in September last year, requires retailers to install new equipment that supports near-field communication (NFC) compatible with its service, which has hindered wider acceptance, consultants said.
“For Samsung, moving online could be a smart move,” IDC Financial Insights global payments research director James Wester said. “It will help them build customer habit and they can benefit from that when US consumers transact in stores.”
While Samsung Pay is the most widely accepted mobile wallet, customer adoption remains a hurdle because many shoppers find it is not worth the trouble to use the service when swiping a credit card is just as easy, he added.
Samsung Pay had an average of eight transactions per US user within the first four weeks of its launch, the company said in October.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day