COPY FROM CHINA
In early 2016, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Indian e-commerce company PayTM, or Pay Through Mobile, had an eye-opening trip to China.
Strolling on the streets of Hangzhou, east China, Sharma was surprised to see QR codes everywhere. A QR code is a cryptic matrix of barcodes that contain scannable information.
Sharma saw almost every shop, vendor or parlor had a QR code printed on a slip of paper. People, many of whom walk around without any cash or credit card, are so used to paying by scanning the code with a mobile phone.
At the moment, PayTM hit a bottleneck in rolling out digital payment in India as they had to provide business owners with costly machines to collect money. Sharma and his engineers had never thought that a code on a piece of paper could do the trick.
Sharma then copied this business mode to India with the help of PayTM's business partner Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba, whose Alipay is one of the most popular mobile wallets in China.
Sharma wouldn't have expected that the cooperation put him in the best place to benefit most from India's upcoming financial reform.
In November, the Indian government decided to scrap 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes, removing four-fifths of the country's paper money. The move was designed to curb corruption. But it had the side effect of catapulting India's transition to digital payment, such as mobile wallets.
"We happened to have the technology, the talents and the money" when the policy came out, Sharma said. The number of PayTM's users exploded, ranking it as the top mobile wallet in India and among the top four in the world.
As more Chinese high-tech companies become globally known and respected, they are gaining followers throughout the world, especially in developing countries who import their business modes and technologies to copy their success in local markets.
Before, some say China copy from Silicon. Now Silicon is learning from China, especially Chinese mobile Internet technologies, Sharma said.
