Tencent teams up with Line on mobile payment service in Japan

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China's internet giant Tencent will partner with Japan's chat app operator Line to provide mobile payment services for small Japanese retailers, Nikkei business daily reported, sending the latter's share up 13 percent on Tuesday.

The move comes as small stores in Japan are looking to tap into the Chinese tourism boom, and Tencent's largest Chinese rival Alibaba just joined hands with Yahoo Japan and Softbank Group to launch the PayPay mobile payment service a few months ago in the country.

Line will lease terminals compatible with Tencent's WeChat Pay to small and midsize Japanese restaurants and stores from mid-December, which will allow them to process payments from the growing numbers of Chinese tourists using WeChat Pay from early next year, Line said.

With the domestic mobile payment sector saturated, Tencent has been actively seeking growth opportunities in overseas markets.

Chen Qiru, vice president of Tencent's Fintech service, said at a conference in November that one of the ways was to make Wechat Pay available in hot tourism destinations for consumers.

Japan received about 7.35 million Chinese visitors last year, triple the number from three years earlier, according to the Japanese government data. The tie-up will help Japanese retailers attract Chinese consumers, who have been accustomed to paying with their phones.

Japan has been slow to move to cashless payments, with a rush of entrants such as Line Pay and SoftBank-backed PayPay encouraging consumers to use QR code-based payments, which have become widespread in China, India and elsewhere.

A Tokyo-based online payment processor has found that cashless payment options can encourage customers to spend more, as a souvenir store found that Chinese customers using Alipay spent 2.6 times as much per visit as the average Chinese shopper, including those paying with cash.