Taylor Swift performed during the live-streaming of Alibaba's Single's Day, the largest shopping event on the planet. (Image via BBC)

Alibaba's Single's Day breaks record in 2019

On Monday, Chinese retail juggernaut, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., recorded the sales of its annual 11th Single’s Day shopping event reached ¥268.4 billion (US$38.4 billion). The number broke the 2018’s record by 25% at US$30.8 billion.

Dubbed as the biggest shopping day on Earth and celebrated on 11 November every year, the most sold goods were clothing and electronic items. Single’s Day is equivalent to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it sells more.

The five-day Black Friday only collected less than US$25 billion, and Cyber Monday only collected US$8 billion in 2018. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s Single’s Day collected US$1 billion in one minute and US$10 billion in 30 minutes.

The record-breaking figure was thanks to Alibaba’s services that reach out to the global communities. AliExpress sells Chinese goods to the world; TMall sells the world’s goods to China; Taobao sells Chinese goods to the Chinese people; and, Lazada covers the ASEAN market. Co-President of Lazada, Yin Jing, stated that the number of buyers and merchants in the shopping platform doubled in 2019.

Dozens of brands received ¥100 million (US$14 million) in pre-order goods.

World’s top musicians, one of them was Taylor Swift, performed in the live-streaming held in Alibaba Campus in Hangzhou. However, in the 2019 11th Single’s Day, the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, was absent.

For the Asian region, Alibaba is competing against JD.com and Pinduoduo. These two retail giants also hosted the same campaign annually. JD.com, starting its campaign on 1 November, gathered more than US$23 billion.

Seeing its success, more retail giants around the world began replicating the campaign such as India’s Flipkart, South Korea’s 11th Street, and Singapore’s Qoo10.

Source: https://tcrn.ch/2KaTdkW