(Bloomberg) --
Wirecard AG agreed to buy Beijing-based AllScore Payment Services, giving the German provider access to a potentially lucrative Chinese license for processing credit-card and mobile transactions.
Under the deal, Wirecard will buy 80% of AllScore shares for as much as 72.4 million euros ($80.6 million) and has an option to buy the rest after two years for 20.2 million euros, the Aschheim-based company said in a statement Tuesday. China's central bank, which oversees the $27 trillion payments market, didn't immediately respond to a fax seeking comment.
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Wirecard, which has been addressing allegations of accounting fraud raised by the Financial Times, would become the latest non-Chinese institution to acquire a payments license, helping it tap the country's expanding market.
Paypal Holdings Inc. in September received a green light for its purchase of a majority stake in Chinese rival Gopay Information Technology Co., allowing it to take on domestic giants WeChat Pay and Alipay.
China allowed foreign companies to enter its payments market from March last year, further increasing access to the world's second-largest economy. Applicants must set up local units, establish payment infrastructure -- including disaster-recovery systems -- and store client information domestically, the People's Bank of China said.
In October, Wirecard raised its long-term guidance, expecting transaction volume to rise to more than 810 billion euros through 2025. The company is due to publish third-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Wirecard said Tuesday it expects an integrated AllScore to generate more than 35 million euros in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization in 2021 and more than 50 million euros in 2022.
--With assistance from Yinan Zhao.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jan-Patrick Barnert in Frankfurt at jbarnert3@bloomberg.net;Eyk Henning in Frankfurt at ehenning1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net, Iain Rogers, Andrew Blackman
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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