According to a report by Alipay, the payments unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba, in the first 10 months of 2014 more than half of all transactions it handled were through mobile phones.

In comparison, the figure for all of last year was 22 per cent.

The Alipay Annual Spending Report reveals that Chinese online shoppers prefer to use their mobile phones to make purchases, particularly in remote areas like Tibet, Shaanxi and Ningxia where broadband infrastructure is lacking and where many people cannot afford PCs and laptops.

In fact, the highest share of mobile payments in the country comes from such areas. In Tibet, 62 per cent of Alipay transactions were done via mobile phones, while the figure for Ningxia was 58 per cent.

Compared to this, the figures for major cities like Beijing (29 per cent) and Shanghai (27 per cent) were much lower.

The trend is further explained by the falling costs of smartphones and the fact that 83 percent of people surveyed by the China Internet Network Information Center said they access the internet on their mobile phones.

Alipay is part of the Alibaba Group. It not only allows users to pay for purchases online but also utility bills, credit card bills and mobile phone top-up.

In October, Alibaba co-founder and chairman Jack Ma said he is interesting in working with Apple on mobile payments.

In the 10 years since its launch in December 2004, 42.3 billion payments have been settled via Alipay. It has over 300 million registered users in China and handles more than 80 million transactions daily. Its mobile application, Alipay Wallet, has 190 million active users.

A subsidiary of Ant Financial Services Group, Alipay also lets users invest through the Yu’e Bao financial services platform, which includes a money market fund.