As the 2025 financial reporting season draws to a close, annual reports from major payment institutions have been fully disclosed. The payment industry in China has now fully transitioned from a period of rapid expansion to a stable development phase, characterized by a slowdown in overall transaction volume growth and intensified competition for market share. Concurrently, the continuous improvement of the regulatory framework and ongoing technological innovations are jointly reshaping the industry's evolution path, driving a cyclical adjustment from scale expansion to quality upgrades, further highlighting the operational divergence among different institutions.
Against this backdrop, domestic market competition is becoming increasingly fierce, making cross-border payment a critical lever for many payment institutions to break through growth bottlenecks. A growing number of enterprises are shifting their strategic focus overseas in search of new growth avenues. A chief analyst pointed out that listed payment companies with disclosed results show significant structural divergence. Traditional acquirer businesses are generally under pressure, while institutions with cross-border capabilities or value-added service support have achieved growth in both revenue and profit. The industry's growth logic has shifted from relying on transaction scale to depending on business structure optimization and compliance capability building.
**Domestic Acquirer Growth Peaks, Profit Quality Supersedes Scale Expansion** In 2025, China's third-party payment industry entered a deep development stage characterized by standardization and maturity. The growth rate of transaction volume continued to slow, and the divergence in institutional performance intensified further. Profit quality has replaced scale expansion as the key metric for measuring a company's core competitiveness. The performance of YEAHKA Group is somewhat representative. The company achieved annual revenue of RMB 33.11 billion, a year-on-year increase of 7.25%; profit attributable to equity holders was RMB 92.244 million, up 11.88% year-on-year, indicating double-digit growth on the profit side.
However, the Gross Payment Volume (GPV) of its domestic payment business was RMB 2.34 trillion, representing a mere 0.1% increase compared to the previous year. To counter the stagnation in scale, YEAHKA raised its domestic payment fee rate from 11.5 basis points in 2024 to 12.3 basis points in 2025, driving its one-stop payment service revenue to RMB 29.02 billion, an 8.0% year-on-year increase.
LIANLIAN achieved growth in both revenue and net profit during the industry's adjustment period. For the year ended December 31, 2025, the company's total revenue reached RMB 17.34 billion, a 31.9% year-on-year increase, setting a new historical high; gross profit increased by 28% year-on-year to RMB 8.73 billion; adjusted operating profit reached RMB 82.26 million, surging 105.9% year-on-year. During the reporting period, the company focused its resources on serving the high-value needs of Chinese enterprises in their globalization efforts, leading to a more solid foundation for the development of its domestic payment business. In 2025, the gross profit margin for the domestic payment business rose to 23%, an increase of 3.3 percentage points year-on-year.
Lakala experienced a slight decrease in revenue but a significant surge in profit for 2025. Data shows that the company achieved operating revenue of RMB 55.47 billion during the reporting period, a decrease of 3.68% year-on-year; however, net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company surged 233.33% year-on-year to RMB 11.71 billion. After deducting non-recurring gains and losses, its attributable net profit was RMB 301 million, a decrease of 45.58% year-on-year. Notably, the sharp profit increase was primarily influenced by non-operational factors: firstly, an increase in the fair value change of held listed company stock assets; secondly, a substantial growth in investment income realized from the sale of part of its holdings in listed companies.
Rendong Holding, the parent company of HeliPay, achieved a performance turnaround following restructuring. In 2025, Rendong Holding saw its net assets turn positive and returned to profitability, achieving a net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company of RMB 359.6 million, a 143.17% year-on-year increase; after deducting non-recurring gains and losses, the attributable net profit was RMB 42.6545 million, up 129.14% year-on-year. The core driver behind this turnaround was its payment business. Its subsidiary, HeliPay, as the core payment business operator, contributed 95.32% of Rendong Holding's revenue, approximately RMB 784 million.
Beyond these leading institutions, the performance of other payment-related companies showed significant divergence. Gaoyang Technology reported consolidated turnover of HKD 2.1185 billion for 2025, a year-on-year decrease of 9%; the annual loss totaled HKD 146 million. The core reason for the shift from profit to loss was a decline in turnover from the payment and digital services segment. As the main revenue source for Gaoyang Technology, this segment's annual turnover was HKD 1.642 billion, down 6% year-on-year, with an operating loss of HKD 187.5 million. The performance pressure on SuiXingFu directly dragged down the group's overall performance.
Cuiwei shares achieved operating revenue of RMB 23.20 billion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 4.08%, but reported a net loss attributable to shareholders of the listed company of RMB -481 million, though the loss narrowed by 30.01% year-on-year. As the core payment entity of Cuiwei shares, Haike Rongtong's traditional acquirer business accumulated a transaction volume of RMB 977.2 billion in 2025, up 13% year-on-year; its digital payment business experienced rapid growth, with transaction volume increasing 141% year-on-year.
In 2025, Jialian Payment, under Xinguodu, processed approximately RMB 1.47 trillion in cumulative transaction volume, remaining basically flat compared to the previous year, with monthly transaction volume trends gradually stabilizing. However, affected by adjustments in new merchant acquisition strategies and increased marketing support, the company's acquirer and value-added services business generated operating revenue of approximately RMB 19.64 billion, a decrease of 7.03% year-on-year.
"From our observations, the domestic acquirer market has entered a stage of stock competition, with transaction volume growth stagnating or even declining. The main reasons are insufficient activity among offline small and micro merchants, ongoing regulatory efforts to compress arbitrage opportunities, and the intensified squeeze from leading platforms on independent acquirers," the analyst stated. The fundamental reasons lie in the following aspects: firstly, declining transaction volume from small and micro merchants directly impacts acquirer transaction scale; secondly, the normalization of regulatory crackdowns on non-compliant business practices has ended the model of obtaining excess returns through practices like code jumping or cash-out arbitrage; thirdly, leading platforms are deeply penetrating the merchant side through ecosystem bindings, such as aggregated payments and mini-programs. Independent acquirers lack their own traffic and user stickiness, making it difficult to maintain their original market share in the context of fee rate transparency. Therefore, it can be concluded that the acquirer business has transitioned from incremental expansion to a stock optimization phase prioritizing efficiency.
**Cross-Border Payment Accelerates Breakthrough, Shifting from Land Grab to Compliant Deep Cultivation** Against the backdrop of sluggish growth in the domestic payment market and increasingly fierce stock competition, cross-border payment, supported by both policy tailwinds and market demand, has become the core direction for payment institutions to break through growth bottlenecks. A manager noted that globally, Chinese companies going overseas are entering a phase of qualitative leap, with cross-border payment upgrading from channel services to a global fund service network.
LIANLIAN designated 2025 as a pivotal year for the comprehensive deepening of its globalization strategy, accelerating its transformation into a new-generation multinational corporation. In 2025, LIANLIAN's Total Payment Volume (TPV) reached RMB 452.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 60.7%; revenue was RMB 10.45 billion, surging 29.3% year-on-year, far exceeding the industry average growth rate. By the end of 2025, LIANLIAN had expanded its global payment licenses and related qualifications to 66, with service coverage extending to over 100 countries and regions, supporting transaction settlements in more than 130 currencies.
Lakala's cross-border payment business also performed notably well, with transaction value reaching RMB 88.9 billion in 2025, an 80.69% year-on-year increase, serving over 210,000 customers, up 73.99% year-on-year. In the first quarter of 2026, its cross-border payment business continued its rapid growth trend, with transaction value up 39% year-on-year and the number of merchants served increasing by 62% year-on-year.
Leveraging a localized operation strategy, YEAHKA achieved leapfrog growth in its overseas payment business. In 2025, its overseas payment business GPV was approximately RMB 5 billion, a substantial 323.3% year-on-year increase. In terms of profitability, YEAHKA's overseas payment fee rate reached 60 basis points, with a gross profit margin of about 50%, significantly higher than its domestic business. Although the overseas business GPV currently contributes only about 0.2% to the overall payment business, its profit contribution has reached approximately 3%, making it an important engine for the group's profit growth.
HeliPay has continued to exert efforts in the cross-border payment field in recent years, achieving high growth in both customer numbers and transaction scale. Its cross-border payment transaction volume in 2025 was approximately RMB 82.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of about 159%. Jialian Payment, under Xinguodu, accelerated its breakthroughs in cross-border payment, with transaction value exceeding RMB 2.4 billion in 2025 and an average quarterly sequential growth rate exceeding 100%. Yiwu Payment, under China Small Commodity City, leveraging the unique ecosystem of Yiwu's small commodity trade, achieved cumulative cross-border collection volume of $11.2 billion by the end of 2025, opened cross-border collection accounts for over 25,000 merchants, with business covering 176 countries and regions and supporting exchanges for 29 mainstream currencies.
"Overall, cross-border payment has become the core direction for payment institutions to break through the domestic ceiling, but the competitive landscape is highly uneven. First movers have built barriers with licenses, clearing networks, and local compliance capabilities, while latecomers face the pressure of high entry barriers and long investment cycles," the analyst predicted. "Judging from developments over the past year or more, cross-border payment will shift from a land grab to compliant deep cultivation, focusing on testing capabilities in foreign exchange settlement efficiency, anti-money laundering systems, data localization, and local merchant services."
He believes that for most institutions, the key to balancing domestic and overseas expansion lies in using the stable cash flow generated by domestic business to support the construction of cross-border compliance systems, rather than simply reallocating resources or creating hype; simultaneously, they must cease relying on non-core methods like asset sales or assisted lending to embellish financial statements and truly focus on building underlying capabilities. Otherwise, the so-called "second growth curve" will be difficult to materialize, and the industry will further consolidate towards leading platforms possessing full-chain cross-border service capabilities.
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