Alipay, the Internet payment subsidiary of the Chinese B2B e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has published its latest statistics and states that by the end of February 2009, the number of its registered users reached 150 million, accounting for about 50% of the total number of Chinese netizens.

The statistics show that the number of newly registered members on Alipay was 57 million in 2008, a nearly doubled increase compared with the previous year, and the newly registered members were mainly in the second and third-tier Chinese cities.

The members of Alipay have two major features: one is they have a strong power of consumption and the other is most of them are young people. In 2008, the per capita trading value of the users of Alipay increased 32.5% year-on-year, which was much higher than the increase of per capita consumption expenditure of Chinese city residents during the same period. At the same time, the number of users between 21 and 35 accounted for 83% of the total users of Alipay.

Alipay says during the entire year of 2008, the number of its users in first-tier cities increased by 112.23% year-on-year. By region, the growth in Hubei was the most obvious and its newly registered numbers were 4.13 million, which was even greater than the total number of the previous four years. By the distribution of the users, the provinces and cities that had the most Alipay users were Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Beijing, Shandong, and Shanghai, of which, Guangdong topped the list with 15 million registered users.

According to Alipay, it currently provides online payment services to 460,000 independent e-commerce corporations in China, with a daily trading volume of up to four million transactions and a daily trading value of up to CNY700 million. The corporate customers of Alipay cover nearly all sectors that have adopted e-commerce, including clothing, electronics, machinery, home supplies, and culture. By distribution, these corporate customers of Alipay are mainly in Guangdong, Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu and by trading volume, corporate customers in Beijing topped the list, followed by those in Shanghai.