China’s largest Internet
retailer rang up more than $9 billion during the country’s biggest online
shopping holiday, smashing last year’s figure to set a record for a single day
of sales.
Analysts said the
“Singles Day” figures from e-commerce giant Alibaba show a continuing shift to
online shopping over brick-and-mortar stores at a time of slowing economic
growth in China.
Singles Day was invented
by Chinese college students in the 1990s as an anti-Valentine’s Day when people
could buy something for themselves. It was set for Nov. 11 because of the
date’s four “ones.”
But Hangzhou-based
Alibaba Group, which is known for its retail sites Taobao and Tmall.com, turned
it into a day of online shopping for all with bargain deals. Other Chinese
online retailers also have followed suit.
The record sales this
year are “more indicative of changes in consumer habits rather than a bellwether
of China’s overall economy,” said Derek Xin, a Beijing-based retail analyst at
Hisend Research.
China’s economy, the
world’s second largest, grew 7.3 per cent last quarter, the slowest pace in
five years.
In 2012, Alibaba posted
sales totalling $3 billion on the Singles Day, surpassing Cyber Monday in the
United States. Last year’s total was $5.71 billion. Alibaba Group announced
this year’s record sales of 57.1 billion yuan ($9.32 billion) for Tuesday shortly
after midnight.
Including other online
retailers such as JD.com, total sales Tuesday were an estimated 67 billion
yuan, said Jiang Jianlin, senior market analyst at IDC China.
He said the Internet has
been a particular draw for the spending power of people in China’s second- and
third-tier cities that aren’t well serviced by traditional retailers.
Online shopping has kept
retail sales robust despite the slowdown in the country’s economy, said Liu
Yuanchun, professor of economics at Renmin University in Beijing.
“It has changed the
commercial ecology and drastically lowered costs,” Liu said. “Online shopping
will continue to grow at fast speeds and could boost China’s future economy.”
—
AP researcher Yu Bing
contributed to this report.
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