China’s Alipay is expanding its mobile payment app service into the United States through partnerships with payment processors First Data and Verifone to reach Chinese consumers traveling abroad. Alipay is targeting top-tier merchants across retail, luxury goods, health supplements and department stores. Verifone supplies more than 29 million payment devices and terminals worldwide. First Data serves more than six million business locations. Alipay has 450 million active users in China and is affiliated with Alibaba.com. Instead of competing head to head with major payments players in foreign markets, Alipay targets the fast growing Chinese tourism market, which numbered 117 million travelers in 2014. Alipay and rival WeChat, a unit of Tencent, together make up 90% of the Chinese mobile payments market. Sabrina Peng, President of Alipay International, said in a recent interview that her company’s ambition is to become a global payments provider over the next decade, with 60% of its transaction volume coming from outside China. “We are targeting two billion users in the next 10 years,” she said. French payment terminal supplier Ingenico announced in August an expanded deal with Alipay to allow merchants across Europe to use Ingenico’s payment gateway to accept payments from Alipay users visiting the region. The Alipay service is also being integrated into terminals from Concardis, a payments provider for merchants in German-speaking Europe. Wirecard, also from Germany, is developing a payment system that uses two-dimensional QR barcodes popular in China to help merchants across Europe accept payments from Alipay users. Alipay has a similar deal with mobile payments start-up Zapper in Britain to allow Chinese tourists to use QR codes in more than 1,000 restaurants there, the South China Morning Post reports.

Russia and Kazakhstan rank first and second on a list of 64 countries and regions cooperating with China in its One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative. Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia occupy the third, fourth and fifth places. The Belt and Road Initiative Big Data Report 2016 analyzed five aspects of cooperation between China and the 64 countries – policy communication, connectivity, trade, finance and public support – and assigned an index number based on the comprehensive findings. The report was written by the Belt and Road Initiative Big Data Center at the State Information Center. China’s cooperation with 32 countries, or half the overall number, “needs to be enhanced,” according to the report. Domestically, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Tianjin and Fujian are the top five provinces and municipalities regarded as “highly participating” in the initiative. Foreign direct investment (FDI) into countries along the initiative routes showed good momentum, with 81.7% of the provinces and regions’ FDI higher than USD1 billion, while 77.42% of the provinces and regions’ had FDI growth greater than 20%, the China Daily reports.

A 10% fall in the yuan’s value against the U.S. dollar over the past 15 months has done little to boost sales of Chinese goods abroad, according to dozens of exporters at the Canton trade fair, the South China Morning Post reports. The Chinese currency has depreciated steadily against the U.S. dollar since the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) devalued the yuan by 1.9% on August 11 last year, hitting a multi-year low of CNY6.77 to the dollar on October 25. But Chinese exports, in dollar terms, shrank 7.5% in the first nine months to USD1.5 trillion. Even in yuan terms, exports dropped by 1.6%. Chinese exporters attending the China Import and Export Fair in Guangzhou (Canton Fair) played down the exchange rate’s role and said they were pinning their hopes on stronger offshore demand and better products. “We have lowered our prices in dollar quotes for foreign clients because of the yuan’s depreciation but we haven’t seen immediate results,” Todd Zhao, a salesman at Shanghai Huayuan New Composite Materials, said. A dozen Chinese exporters at the fair said they were more concerned about economic conditions overseas. Some buyers said there were not enough new products at the fair.

China wants to increase the average life expectancy of its citizens to 77.3 years by 2020 and 79 years by 2030, up from last year’s 76.34, according to the “Healthy China 2030” blueprint. The document noted that industrialization, urbanization, an aging population, as well as environmental and lifestyle changes had created new health challenges, and nationwide strategies are needed to solve “major and long-term health-related issues.” The number of people “frequently participating in physical exercise” should increase to 530 million by 2030 from 360 million in 2014, and the smoking rate of those aged 15 or above should be lowered to 20%. China aims to have three certified or assistant doctors, and 4.7 registered nurses, for every 1,000 residents by 2030, when China will also have a nationwide network for monitoring food safety and recording food-borne diseases, according to the blueprint.

Wang Jianlin, Chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, retains the No. 1 spot in the latest Forbes list of China’s richest, with a CNY215 billion fortune. This year there are a record 400 billionaires and billionaire families from mainland China on the list, up from 335 a year ago. Total wealth held by the 400 on the list grew 14% to USD947 billion from USD830 billion a year earlier. Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba Group, ranked second, with his wealth climbing nearly 30% from USD21.8 billion last year to USD28.2 billion. Tencent Chairman Ma Huateng saw his wealth soar from USD17.6 billion last year to USD24.5 billion this year, an increase attributed to a roughly 45% rise in Tencent’s Hong Kong-traded shares in the past year. The top three billionaires are the same as on the recently published Hurun China Rich List 2016. “The increase in the number of billionaires and billionaire families shows that great business opportunities exist in China as the country’s structural changes continue.” said Russell Flannery, Senior Editor of the Forbes China Rich List. The Forbes list ranked Wang Wei, Chairman of the delivery service SF Express, as fourth wealthiest person in China worth USD18.5 billion. His net wealth soared from USD4 billion last year, after the parent company SF Holdings Group, in which he has a 68% stake, received government approval for a stock market listing. William Ding at NetEase staged a dramatic rise from No. 10 to No. 5 on the list, passing Baidu’s Robin Li.