Xiamen Metro to Start Trial Operation, Will Accept Wechat Pay

Xiamen Metro Line 1, which is expected to be put into trial operation by the end of this December, will allow passengers to buy tickets via WeChat Pay.

This December, a Xiamen Metro app will be released that will work with WeChat Pay, and will allow passengers to pay Xiamen Metro fares by QR code scan.

Xiamen E-tong card, an electronic payment card, allows top-up services via WeChat Pay. In the near future, Xiamen residents will be allowed to take ferry boats to Kinmen via WeChat Pay, according to Tencent.

Currently, about 5,350 parking spaces in Siming District accept WeChat Pay, and more than 400 parking lots in Xiamen also allow WeChat Pay.

The new availability of WeChay Pay for public services is the result of cooperative efforts between the Xiamen government and Tencent on smart city construction. The Chinese internet giant Tencent will continue to expand its "smart city" construction into more fields and industries, including transportation, medical services, and education.

Tencent won a contract to provide internet-based services to a government department in Xiamen for just RMB 0.01 in March of this year.

The project aimed to provide cloud-hosting services for the Xiamen Information Center. The project's budget was 4.95 million yuan. It attracted bids from five parties, including all three of China's state-run telecom carriers and a local Xiamen company. Bids from the four companies not including Tencent ranged from RMB 1.7 million from the local unit of China Telecom Corp. to RMB 3.09 million from the local unit of China Unicom.

Industry observers noted that RMB 0.01 was the lowest possible bid, and that such lowball offers are relatively common in emerging industries such as cloud services.

One similar case was e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, which has acknowledged that its cloud unit basically helped China's rail operator set up its online ticket website for free. Since then, the operator has become a major client.