China spent nearly as much as Google’s quarterly revenue for Singles Day

12 Nov 2015

China simply can’t spend enough when it comes to Singles Day, with Alibaba announcing that this year has broken all records with $14.3bn being spent in one day, making it the single biggest spend in consumer history.

While each year sees the American market go crazy following Thanksgiving for Black Friday, China looks down from up high when it celebrates its own spending frenzy on Singles Day.

And this year’s outing proved to be even more eye-watering than usual, with Alibaba confirming the vast, vast sums of money generated in just one day, almost equating to Google’s entire revenues for Q3 this year.

As Siliconrepublic.com reported yesterday, Alibaba and its founder Jack Ma spared no expense to get the Chinese population riled up for a day of spending, wheeling out Chinese celebrities and Hollywood stars like Daniel Craig and Kevin Spacey to promote the event.

And now it appears that it has coincided with a 60pc increase in revenues over Singles Day 2014, through Alibaba’s payments service Alipay, and a 158pc increase overall.

In fact, it broke the previous year’s record in less than half the time it took for the whole day in 2014.

Particularly strong this year was its number of mobile buyers through Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace, with 95m people buying through their phone, among a total of 710m payment transactions.

At its peak, Alipay processed 85,900 transactions per second, while its sister service AliCloud processed a total of 140,000 transactions per second at its peak.

It seems almost impossible to get your head around the logistics of getting so many packages to the millions of consumers who purchased goods for Singles Day, but Alibaba said that it takes 1.7 million couriers, 400,000 vehicles and 200 planes to achieve this.

In a statement, Alibaba’s CEO Daniel Zhang said: “This day demonstrates the power of domestic China consumption, and the Chinese consumer’s strong demand for international products. It also showcases how Alibaba uses big data, cloud computing and mobile innovations to create the best shopping experience for buyers and sellers.”

Alibaba mobile app image via Bloomua/Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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