Written by Mani
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA) has broken its own previous records by logging over $9 billion in the first 12 hours of China’s Singles’ Day sales.
The Chinese e-commerce giant has matched the 2014 Singles’ Day figure of $9.3 billion just after midday Wednesday.
Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales hit new high year after year
The Chinese e-commerce giant, which six years ago turned November 11 into China’s equivalent of U.S. shopping event Cyber Monday, said today that its 2015 sales have eclipsed last year’s final results in a little over half the time.
According to research firm IDC, this year’s sales could rise to as much as $13.8 billion, a growth of almost 50% from last year’s total.
As outlined by ValueWalk, Alibaba smashed all the previous sales records for its Singles’ Day shopping event by logging $9.34 billion during the 24-hour period last year, while analysts were anticipating orders worth $8.1 billion. This was way above the previous year’s figure of $5.8 billion.
Earlier, Alibaba was indicating that this year’s Singles’ Day shopping event would set a new record. The e-commerce giant expected its partners to deploy 1.7 million deliverymen, 400,000 vehicles, 5,000 warehouses, and over 200 airplanes to handle the deliveries following the Singles’ Day event.
Alibaba said this year there would be over 40,000 merchants, and 30,000 brands from 25 countries selling goods on its platforms. Over 130 million users have already visited its marketplace app, Taobao, which exceeds the peak from last year.
Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang exuded confidence that this year’s event would mean “the whole world will witness the power of Chinese consumption”. He promised consumers “a new surprise every hour” over the 24-hour marathon, especially mobile users. The firm said over 27 million purchases came via mobile devices in the first hour.
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