The company said Sunday March 16, 2014 that it has “decided to commence the process of an initial public offering in the United States”. It generated revenue of $5 billion (31.18 billion yuan) in the first 90 minutes of event. Singles Day is becoming a topic of conversation in the USA with retailers providing offers for a few years now.
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Singles Day is huge in China.
According to Alibaba, it was just eight minutes past midnight when the sale officially started, around $1 billion was already spent by customers.
The company noted that it surpassed last year’s $9.3 billion total with 14 hours still remaining in the sales event. However, the Chinese e-commerce giant’s shares fell 1.99% to $79.81 on Wednesday, and went down another 0.76% in pre-market trading Thursday.
To put this into perspective, the biggest online shopping day in the USA – Cyber Monday – only hit $2 billion in sales previous year.
However, the bulk of Singles Day sales may have been transferred from offline sales, said Cao Lei of the China Online Commerce Research Center. It is very relevant to assume that majority would have waited for Singles Day to spend heavily.
Furthermore, Alibaba’s mobile messaging app, Laiwang, has failed to take off, so building attractive shopping apps and sites may help the company ward off competition from Tencent’s WeChat, which has become a smartphone staple for many Chinese consumers.
Mobile sales alone came in at a whopping $9.8 billion worth of merchandise which is higher than the combined sales of all items for the retail company in 2014. “The whole world will witness the power of Chinese consumption this November 11”.
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Alibaba’s early performance indicators show that this year’s Singles Day was a blowout. During the 24-hour shopping event, JD said that the value of goods sold increased more than 140% from last year’s Singles’ Day, but it didn’t disclose sales figures.
