Briefing on the development of POS terminals in China from central bank data

According to the overall situation of the central bank's payment system over the years, the number of POS terminals nationwide has maintained rapid growth, especially in the three years from 2013 to 2015, the annual growth rate is more than 5 million units. However, in view of the growth rate of accepting merchants, POS terminals will also enter a slowdown in the next few years, which is the inevitable result of the bank card acceptance environment tends to be perfect.

The number of domestic POS machines (10,000 units) and growth rate from 2008 to 2015

2008-2015 bank card acceptance merchants (10,000 households) and growth rate

From the growth rate of 2008-2015, the growth of POS terminal growth line acceptance merchants is almost the same. It is worth noting that in 2015, the number of merchants accepting bankcards nationwide increased by 38.8% year-on-year to 16.7 million, but it has fallen by 18.8 percentage points compared with 2014. The total number of POS terminals in 2015 reached 22.811 million, an increase of 43.2% over the same period last year. The rate fell by 6.7 percentage points.

2013-2015 domestic POS machine quarter size (10,000 units) and growth rate

Bank card acceptance merchants (10,000 households) and growth rate in the 2013-2015 quarter

From the perspective of quarterly growth rate, both POS terminals and bank card accepting merchants have considerable fluctuations. The year-on-year growth rate in each quarter of 2014 is basically in a downturn. This situation has improved in the first quarter of 2015.

Written in the back

With the rise of e-commerce, the growth of physical merchants has slowed down, and the development of POS machines has also been affected. From the data point of view, the growth rate of pos machine in the first quarter of 2015 is much higher than that of accepting merchants. The side shows that the competition in the POS machine market is becoming more and more fierce, and the situation of one store and multiple machines will be more and more. The growth rate of the two is not at a level, which means that there will be more brutal competition between POS machines in the same store. In order to strengthen competition, POS machines must bring more differentiated services to different merchants and different industries. This is one of the reasons why smart POS machines became popular in 2015.

In addition, in 2015, third-party payment companies such as WeChat Alipay continued to exert their strengths offline, which affected the enthusiasm of merchants to access traditional POS machines to a certain extent. In other words, the emergence and development of scan code payment has already challenged traditional POS machines, and single card payment has been difficult to meet the daily needs of merchants. Especially for small and micro merchants, in order to reduce operating costs, more merchants tend to use WeChat and Alipay for P2P collection, and the mobile phone completes the POS acquiring function, which directly causes the POS machine to decrease in growth rate. Perhaps mobile and miniaturization can also become one of the development directions of POS machines. More and more complete and more complete mPOS will go to market. On the other hand, the smart pos opportunity that integrates multiple acquiring methods has more market opportunities.

Some people in the POS industry pointed out that the number of POS terminals can still maintain a high growth rate in at least three years in the future. Intelligent, integrated and mobile will become the three major directions for POS development. In the era of mobile payment, the POS industry will also face more challenges and opportunities.