Electronics major Samsung currently has over 2.5 million people using Samsung Pay, the cashless payment facility offered by the company, a senior official said.

“We started the year (2017) with the launch of Samsung Pay (in India). Currently, there are about 2.5 million users across the country,” company General Manager, Aditya Babbar told reporters.

In an effort to expand business, he said the company had made investments of Rs. 4,915 crore at the facility in Noida to double the capacity.

Babbar, quoting GFK Data (a research agency), said the company clocked market share of 47 percent in the overall smartphone segment as of September.

To a query, he said Tamil Nadu was one of the “top five markets” for the company and every third phone sold was a Samsung “J series” smartphone.

Samsung India currently has 1.50 lakh outlets of which 1,900 are company-owned, he added.

“On September 12 we had announced that we had 1.5 million users of Samsung Pay. Now we have an additional 1 million users in the last one-and-half months. The user growth has been significant,” Samsung India Director Commercialization Group (Product Planning) Sanjay Razdan told reporters here.

Samsung Pay is available for users of devices like Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8 plus, Galaxy S7 Edge, Galaxy J7 Max and Galaxy J7 Pro, among others and allows users to just tap and pay using the debit/credit cards and wallets stored on their mobile devices.

During the launch Samsung Pay was available through 10 models and has expanded it to 26 models since then.

According to industry estimates the overall mobile phone market in India is pegged at Rs 1 lakh crore for 2017, with Samsung commanding a market share of 47 per cent at the end of September 30.

Samsung witnessed a growth of 40 per cent in terms of value during the festive season this year for its handset sales.

It has 17 partners on board, including 10 banks and is in talks with a couple of more banks for pay service.

Razdan, who heads the Samsung Pay business in India, said some of the other countries are trying to implement some of India’s model like bank to bank transfer.