The total GMV for Alibaba Group’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival soared to US$14.3 billion (RMB 91.2 billion) this year.
In doing so, Singles’ Day 2015 crushed last year’s total of $9.3 billion for the 24-hour online sale by 60 per cent and easing concerns that Chinese consumers are cutting spending as the country’s economy slows.
“This day demonstrates the power of domestic China consumption, and the Chinese consumer’s strong demand for international products,” said Alibaba Group CEO, Daniel Zhang, in a statement.
“It also showcases how Alibaba uses big data, cloud computing and mobile innovations to create the best shopping experience for buyers and sellers.”
Alibaba’s 11.11 festival has grown quickly since its debut in 2009 into the world’s largest 24-hour online sale. This year’s performance reinforces that claim. American consumers spent $2.038 billion on Cyber Monday last year, according to comScore.
The strong 11.11 results were announced on the same day as the release of a robust China retail sales report for October, brightening hopes that the growing spending power of the country’s consumers can help offset a slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. It took 11.11 bargain hunters a little over 12 hours to drive GMV past last year’s total for the entire 24-hour event.
“We never think about China’s economy,” Zhang said in response to a reporter’s question during a media briefing yesterday. “We think about how to meet and how to create demand among consumers.”
Alibaba this year encouraged more overseas brands and merchants to join the sale by selling directly from overseas to Chinese consumers through Alibaba’s marketplaces, a practice called cross-border e-commerce.
Top countries selling to China included the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Australia.
While Alibaba did not release international GMV results, the company said more than 16,000 international brands completed transactions on 11.11, and 33 per cent of total buyers purchased from international brands or merchants. Buyers and sellers came from 232 countries and regions.
More and more, those consumers are shopping by mobile phone. GMV for transactions completed over mobile devices and settled by Alipay during the sale accounted for 68.7 per cent of total GMV, a striking increase from last year’s sale when 42.6 per cent of the total was conducted by mobile. Digitally savvy Chinese are taking to m-commerce to shop for goods and services at a faster rate than consumers in other countries. Chinese in poorer rural areas and smaller cities are doing so particularly quickly, leapfrogging PC technology and going straight to smartphones to access the Internet for entertainment and business.
When Alibaba launched the festival in 2009, “we never dreamed it could be such a huge shopping day,” Zhang said.
“We are very happy to see the huge demand by Chinese consumers for international products, and we believe this is just the beginning. Globalisation will be a long journey, but we want to bring this 11.11 festival from a China shopping day to a global shopping day in the coming decade,” he said.
This story first appeared on Inside Retail’s sister site, Inside Retail Asia.
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