China Mobile has seen a take-up of 2.5m NFC handsets, 600,000 SIMs and 1.4m NFC-enabled POS terminals, the carrier's Liu Xin has revealed at the GSMA's NFC & Mobile Money Summit in New York. Those figures are, however, "quite small" for China, he told attendees.

CALL FOR NFC: China Mobile's Liu Xin speaking in New York

A "lack of mass-market NFC handsets, complex SIM card upgrades and insufficient experience in making and accepting transactions among the public and businesses has left mobile payments languishing on a small scale in China," Liu explained.

NFC handsets in China have tended to be high-end models, he added, and accounted for only 4% of the 60m phones conforming to China's TD 3G standard sold this year.

"We need to lower the threshold of NFC phones," Liu said. "It should not be an additional function but must be a default one like GPS or WiFi."