Chinese conglomerate Tencent missed the mark overall in the fourth quarter of 2018, but its WeChat Pay showed significant growth, particularly as the number of merchants actively transacting on the platform was up 80% year-over-year.

WeChat and its local version, Weixin, reached about 1.1 billion monthly active users, driven in part by the platform’s payment functionality, Tencent CEO Pony Ma said during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.

“In payments, we further broadened its use cases and grew total commercial payment volume rapidly despite intense market competition,” he said. “We are now operating the largest mobile payment platform in China, measured by active users and the number of transactions.”

The company’s earnings report said Weixin, in 2018, “penetrated lower-tier cities and covered a wider age group of users.”

Martin Lau, President of Tencent, said that “tens of millions of mom-and-pop stores” are now accepting mobile payments via WeChat Pay’s QR code solution, which, he noted, “does not require expensive point-of-sales equipment.” He said average daily commercial transactions on Weixin Pay more than doubled YoY in 2018, as did the accompanying merchant revenue through Tencent.

There are now over 1 billion transactions daily on Weixin Pay, and commercial payments grew to represent over 50% of the total transaction volume on Weixin Pay in 2018, according to the earnings report.

On the call, Ma also touted Tencent’s enterprise app, WeChat Work, which he said is gaining popularity among large enterprises in particular. He said WeChat Work helps enterprises “deepen their customer engagement and strengthen their post-sales interactions” while supporting customers’ database management, which allows enterprises to “more powerfully analyze their data.” The platform also facilitates office administration via plugins for capabilities such as expense claim approvals, he said.

About 80% of the top 500 enterprises in China are now registered as WeChat Work corporate users, according to the earnings report.

Identifying payments as one of the “key infrastructure platforms” of the company, Tencent appears poised to build out capabilities in 2019.

“For FinTech, we will drive innovation in our payment product development and add new payment use cases,” the earnings report said. “We will also expand our FinTech solutions and product portfolio to cater to the wealth management and financial needs of our users.”

Cross-border services

Tencent said a cross-border mobile payment service it launched in October 2018, which enables WeChat Pay Hong Kong users to conduct RMB-denominated transactions funded by Hong Kong dollars, now covers about 1 million merchants, including taxi-hailing, food ordering, and high-speed railway ticketing services, in Mainland China. Transaction volume of WeChat Pay Hong Kong increased more than 10 times YoY, the company said.

“Globally, we are expanding our footprint by supporting China outbound travelers to make cross-border payments in overseas destinations, and we now offer real-time tax refund services for Weixin Pay users in over 80 airports,” the earnings report said. “Weixin Pay is now available in 49 markets outside Mainland China, supporting cross-border payment transactions in 16 currencies.”