Startup - December 1, 2020

What Can We Expect From Huawei Pay in South Africa?

December 1, 2020

5 min read

Chinese tech giant Huawei made the news recently by disclosing that on the 3rd of December, it will be launching its payment service Huawei Pay in South Africa. The company, which is widely known to be a smartphone manufacturer is on the move to take a share of the thriving financial transactions market in Africa.

Huawei Pay will use Quick Response (QR) technology powered by South African fintech company Zapper and will support credit cards and debits across the top banks in South Africa.

Huawei device owners can download the Huawei Wallet app through the Huawei AppGallery, and can then use the Huawei Pay service to buy a variety of products across an extensive range of leading South African retailers.

They can download the Huawei Wallet app from the Huawei AppGallery, and use the

Huawei Pay service to purchase a variety of items from a wide range of leading South African stores.

The Wallet nature of Huawei Pay ensures that the payment platform operates without requesting for sensitive financial data.

Huawei has stated that its payment service Huawei Pay does not use your bank card number nor is this information stored or shared with merchants.

Likun Zhao, the Huawei Consumer Business Group VP for Southern Africa said, “With Huawei Pay, you add your bank cards to the app and then pay in stores simply by scanning the Zapper QR Payment Code on the bill when you check out.

It’s a simple and convenient payment solution that we know will make the lives of South African consumers easier.”

Zapper CEO Brett White said the partnership will be beneficial to the South African mobile payments market.

“Huawei is a favourite among a large portion of smartphone owners in South Africa and equipping them with access to Zapper’s scan-to-pay platform will empower them to make fast, safe payments across the country,” said White.

We are in the business of facilitating transactions and by putting the Zapper solution in the hands of millions of South African consumers, many more merchants can now also confidently offer cashless transactions.”

Brand Extension

Huawei move into fintech is a new and audacious one. There is no speculating whether other top phone manufacturers such as Techno, Infinix, Itel (all Transsion owned brands) and Samsung with a huge market share in Africa will be making a similar move.

Considering that Huawei ranks as one of the top competing phone brands in Africa and is used by a large portion of South Africa’s population, we can expect Huawei Pay to scale as fast as Opay did in Nigeria.

Unusual Partnerships

The partnership between Huawei and Zapper to power Huawei Pay comes as a disruption of some sort to the kind of partnerships we’ve been seeing on the continent. This might open the door for distinct entities to begin to take advantage of opportunities via partnerships.