Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has broken its own previous records by logging over $9 billion in the first 12 hours of China’s Singles’ Day sales.
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Alibaba said that more than $1 billion was spent within eight minutes of when the sale began at midnight. With other online retailers like Jingdong Group and Suning Commerce Group joining the fray, the day has become a major sales event comparable to the Lunar New Year. The goal is to assist USA businesses in becoming e-commerce companies like Amazon.com Inc. using Alibaba services, including its logistics, payments operation and cloud computing, he said.
As 16,000 brands participated in the mega sale, 1.7 million couriers, 4 lakh vehicles and 200 planes will be delivering products.
In a bright spot, October retail sales – a key indicator of consumer spending – jumped 11.0 percent from a year earlier, the fastest increase since December last year, official figures showed Wednesday. About an hour and a half later, one-day orders had passed the combined total of its five previous Singles Days, it tweeted. That compares to $2bn in the same time period of the sales event past year.Singles Day – which is called Double Eleven by most of China in reference to the date on which it falls – was reputedly started by singleton students in 1993.
The company is looking forward to bring goods from United States small and medium size enterprises to customers in Asia, where there is demand for high-quality and unique items, Ma said as Alibaba was winding up its shopping promotion for Singles’ Day.
“This is a great day and it symbolizes the great power of China’s domestic consumption”, said Jack Ma, Alibaba’s executive chairman, addressing reporters ahead of the release of the final sales tally. To put that in perspective, USA shoppers bought $2 billion worth of goods online last Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving that was the biggest US online shopping day in 2014.
Singles Day is also known as Bachelors Day because of the gender imbalance caused by China’s one-child policy and traditional preferences to have sons. The second-ranking JD.com, though much smaller in volume, said 32 million orders were placed on Thursday, up 130 percent from a year ago.
Alibaba accounts for more than 80 percent of China’s internet sales market.
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Like Alibaba, JD had a great day for mobile sales.
