Mobile payment is a trend that leads to investment opportunities

MarketWatch columnist Rivers (Jeff Reeves) points out that the rise of mobile payments is a trend, and investors who are interested in taking advantage of this opportunity can consider five of the stocks he recommends, ebay, Whilfons, Visa, Apple, and Google.

The following is the full text of Rivers ' comments:

Investors who prefer long-term operations are the ones who are most enthusiastic about looking for the so-called big trend. In other words, a major change in the economy has provided a sustainable investment theme, which, needless to say, is almost guaranteed to make money.

Now, mobile payments are just such a trend.

According to the statistics portal Statista estimates, the turnover of mobile payment transactions has risen from $106 billion trillion in 2011 to $235 billion trillion last year, that is to say, the two-year period has surged 120%.

In addition, Statista also believes that by 2017, the total size of global mobile payment transactions will reach $721 billion trillion.

Needless to say, of course, this is an estimate, not to mention that such a major change in the global economy is one thing, and whether specific investors can benefit from a particular investment is another matter.

There's nothing to be sure about emerging mobile payments, but we can really make a short list of who's going to be the big trend over the next few years.

EBay

ebay, which owns PayPal, has been in the forefront of mobile payments for a long time. Currently, they are starting to offer credit to PayPal users, which means that ebay is undergoing a gradual transition from former technology and e-commerce companies to becoming more of a financial service player.

Carl Icahn, who tried to force the parent company to tear down the db, has been frustrated, which means that if you want to capture PayPal's mobile payment potential, the only way is to invest in ebay stocks. Fortunately, although Icahn once claimed that ebay was wrong about the department's management strategy, it appears that the possible error has not been an obstacle to PayPal's success.

In the 2013 fiscal year, ebay's payment business accounted for 44% of the company's trading revenues, or $13.8 billion trillion of $6.1 billion, a percentage of 2011 to 41% in fiscal year 2012, which showed a clear year-on-year increase.

Also worthy of attention is that the only look at the PayPal department of their own figures, year-on-year comparisons, is also a marked rise in the trend. The $6.1 billion trillion in fiscal 2013 is about 49% higher than the $4.1 billion trillion two years ago. Also, PayPal handled a total of $179.7 billion trillion in the 2013 fiscal year, up 60% per cent from 111.8 billion dollars in fiscal year 2011.

Any company that handles more than $100 billion a year in cash apparently has huge potential in the area of payment. While ebay's e-commerce sector has been less than ideal, the sheer potential of PayPal alone is enough to justify investors considering their shares.

Whilfons

Although many consumers do not know their names, in fact, Whilfons (VeriFone) has become a leader in secure electronic payments. They also have some traditional businesses such as touch-screen registers and swipe-cards, but for their future, mobile payments are becoming increasingly important.

Their payware mobile technology makes it possible for businesses to use a mobile device as a credit card reader with a small attachment. Given that Whilfons has set a loud brand in the area of secure payments, consumers and businesses are clearly confident about the safety of Payware.

Yes, Whilfons is an old-school enterprise on the whole, still struggling to adapt to the new era, and they are small, with a market capitalisation of just 3.7 billion dollars, but ultimately, they are the markets ' leader in the payment terminals. In the EMV point-of-sale area, they occupy 60% of the market share, which can not be ignored in any case.

Also, the stock has risen by more than 73% per cent in nearly 12 months, but the earnings forecast is only about 17 per cent, apparently at a reasonable price.

Admittedly, the mobile payment company Square, which has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley, also offers a similar Whilfons interface. But what about Square's reality? Despite the helm of one of the famous Twitter founders, doxycycline (Jack Dorsey), some reports tell us that the company is still burning money and sales are extremely bad.

Only a real venture capitalist might have an appetite for square. If you are an individual investor, you should choose the player who has the core business to rely on, that is, whale. After a series of recent cost-cutting measures, management may have completed the task of sizing up its own payments business to prepare for Take-off.

At the very least, they are also qualified to be the target of a big player who wants to get involved in mobile payments.

Visa

Visa (V) remains one of the world's leading providers of payment processing, and we cannot ignore their existence when it comes to the mobile payment revolution.

At the moment, Visa is profiting from the cashless fashion that pervades the United States and the world. In the United States, about 80% per cent of payments are made in non-cash form, compared with more than 90% in some European countries. Visa's performance in these countries is strong, and the growing popularity of credit and debit cards in emerging markets is also opening up the territory, driving the share price higher.

It should be noted, however, that although point-of-sale terminals are indeed a powerful driver of the company's growth, Visa is already not a company that relies on everyone's credit card to make a fortune. As early as 2002, they began to promote the remote payment technology, it is now the predecessor of the PayWave.

PayWave Marvell the chip into your card, allowing the latter to communicate with some specialized readers to complete the transaction. It was a shrewd move to combine traditional, magnetic-stripe plastic cards with near-field technology, which was respected by the mobile payment world.

Now, all we have to do is take the chip out of the card and put it in your smartphone, and mobile payments are immediately possible.

If the paying giant can get enough consumers and enough businesses to accept the technology on its own brand, the next story will be very simple.

Apple

Speaking of the AAPL of Apple, IBank is a long-standing concept. In the final analysis, the tech giant has reached a level of $150 billion trillion in cash and investment.

While Apple's fortunes are tightly tied to hardware, especially the flagship iphone, which accounts for half of the company's revenue, the future is likely to have to focus increasingly on software and peripheral services to keep the company thriving.

On Apple's new opportunity list, mobile payments are certainly among the top.

In 2012, Apple launched the Passbook to help users manage various cards and coupons. In the 2013, they introduced fingerprint technology to their products to improve security. Now, many observers believe that Apple is teaming up with Visa in the mobile payments arena.

This is a well-known secret.

While critics will say that Apple has been on the grapevine for too long, it is worth pointing out that even though Apple has no pure payment arm, they have made great strides in the area of mobile commerce.

During the 2013-year holiday shopping season, tablets and mobile phones that use the iOS operating system accounted for 23% of E-commerce sales, five times times more than Android devices. Also, the average iOS user pays 93.94 dollars per order.

Obviously, Apple knows some of the secrets of helping online business development. It may not be easy to translate this into the success of mobile payments, but its help is undeniable. ，

Google

Now that we've talked about the potential of apple in mobile payment, it certainly won't forget Google (GOOG).

Google, like Apple, has a full safety deposit box, with cash and short-term investments of about 61 billion dollars. In the last quarter of the global smartphone shipments, their Android system was dominated by 85% of the share, which is clearly a good starting ground.

In fact, Google has relied on its own Google Wallet technology on the road.

Google Wallet is very versatile. One of their obvious strengths ahead of Apple is its "click-and-Pay" feature, which relies on near-field communications technology from many Android devices, and Apple's products are now lagging behind.

At the same time, Google is clearly not satisfied with just paying, Google Wallet features and Gmail mail payment, as well as with a number of specific member programs sync.

The most obvious use of Google Wallet is, of course, to make it easier for people to go to Google Play to buy apps or buy content for Android devices. However, if consumers are thoroughly familiar with and accepted the Google Wallet, more mobile phones have near-field communication capabilities, more businesses have a compatible card reader, we all know what will happen in the future.

In Google, where market share is a key word, their other big advantage is that their Google Wallet has been polished for three years while others are still thinking about how to accelerate access to mobile payments.