Korean Samsung Pay users spend $30m in first month of launch

Samsung devices are hugely popular within Korea, and the WSJ notes that the “launch was boosted by a massive advertising campaign”, so this doesn’t necessarily suggest that it will see achieve similar take-up in the US when it launches on Monday – especially given the limited number of Samsung devices that support it …

More than US$30m has been spent through Samsung Pay since the mobile payment service’s launch in Korea one month ago, Samsung has revealed. Last month, it got the ball rolling first in its home country, where it is reporting positive adoption numbers.

It might interest you to learn that 60 percent of those initial Samsung Pay transactions were executed with the new(ish) Samsung Galaxy Note 5. As such, Samsung is updating its mobile payment app with new features and tweaks to improve the user experience ahead of the full roll out. Replicating that success in the USA, where it will be up against Android Pay and Apple Pay, might be more hard.

The one major advantage Samsung Pay has over Apple Pay is Magnetic Secure Transmission technology, which enables it to work with traditional card readers as well as modern NFC terminals. By supporting both, the number of retailers that accept Samsung Pay is much larger than the number that allow shoppers to use NFC based platforms. As it is a hardware issue, it is not easy to transfer those capabilities to older models. The United Kingdom, Spain, and China are also in Samsung’s target.

The South Korean giant officially released Samsung Pay at home on August 20. It hasn’t made any mention of plans to do the same for the United States or future markets.