Economic recovery boosts fortunes of small and mid-sized vendors

China's consumption, especially for small and mid-sized vendors, is on a steady recovery trajectory, reflected by the boost in digital payment activities offline.

Yeahka, a leading payment-based technology platform, announced that both its revenue and net profit in the first half of the year jumped by more than 30 percent, thanks to domestic consumption recovery.

Moreover, the number of active merchants on the platform also surged 30.6 percent year-on-year to about 6.13 million. The number of consumers, especially those who made small and high-frequency purchases for offline payment, grew by 67.2 percent year-on-year to 822.4 million.

The company also said the revenue from technology-enabled business services, including Saas, marketing services and fintech, as well as the newly launched in-store e-commerce service platform, swelled by 86.6 percent in the first half of 2021, while their contribution to the total gross profit grew to 43.5 percent from 34.9 percent.

"The recovery of China's real economy in the first half of 2021 has provided Yeahka a perfect opportunity to expand its business from payments to digital technology-enabled services," said Luke Liu, founder and Chairman of the Shenzhen-based firm.

Compared with mobile payment behemoths Alipay and WeChat Pay, it focuses on enabling merchants to receive, manage and analyze mobile payment data from all platforms.

China's GDP increased by 12.7 percent in the first half of 2021, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, while retail consumption contributed more than 60 percent of the GDP growth.