ATMCommunity.com says that China is a market to watch in 2010 and beyond. With more than 1.3 billion people, China is the world's largest and most populous country, accounting for 20 percent of the world's population.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for International Economics, China has been the world's fastest-growing economy for the past three decades. That continual growth bodes well for ATMs, says GRG Banking Equipment Co. Ltd., a leading ATM provider in China and Asia, overall.
Since the first ATM installation in 1986 at Bank of China, the ATM industry has grown significantly. According to Financial News, by the end of 2008, the number of ATMs connected to China UnionPay had reached 167,300 terminals — out of the 192,000 ATMs in the country. The average ATM density of China at the end of 2007, however, was still below 200 ATMs per million people — below the world average of 270 ATM per million people.
"It remains huge growth potential for the ATM market in China, particularly among the giant five state-owned banks, which have not yet equipped all their branches," GRG says in a news release.
And to reach penetration levels equivalent to those in Western Europe, China's number of ATMs will need to increase almost eightfold.
In the global ATM market, China ranks third, in terms of market scale, trailing the United States and Japan. London-based Retail Banking Research Ltd. estimates the total number of ATMs in China will reach to 250, 000 ATMs by the end of 2010.
The expectation is to have 260,000 ATMs installed in China by mid-2012. That retailization of ATMs in China is expected to get cash flowing into and out of the country at a faster rate, according to the ATM Industry Association.
In China, the market is a bit unique, in that certain parts of the country's development vary greatly. In some major cities, ATM density relative to population is not far from Western standards. In rural areas, however, where much of the population is underbanked, ATMs are almost non-existent. Although domestic banks have made progress in connecting machines to their IT networks, some ATMs and branches still operate offline.
