Alibaba’s Singles Day Brings In $5 Billion In 90 Minutes

For those who are living in the Western world, Alibaba might not necessarily be a company you might have heard of, or if you did, it might have only been in passing. Instead you might be more familiar with companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and etc. However over in Asia, especially China, Alibaba is a big deal.

Last year during Singles Day (the 11th of November, or 11/11), the company managed to rake in a whopping $1 billion in sales within 17 minutes. Now it looks like despite the devaluation of the Chinese RMB, it seems that consumers in China were still more than willing to spend and according to the latest figures, Alibaba saw $5 billion in sales within the first 90 minutes of Singles Day going live.

For those unfamiliar with the event, Singles Day could be thought of as China’s equivalent of Black Friday. The idea is that if you’re single, you have no commitments (at least not as far as a partner or kids are concerned) meaning that you should “celebrate” by going spending on things that you want.

Breaking down that $5 billion, the company claims that 74% of the sales went to mobile phones, showcasing that the smartphone market in China is still growing. To put this into context, last year’s Singles Day totalled $9.34 billion in a one day, versus Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US which amounted to $6.56 billion.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General, Shopping
Tags: alibaba, China, Social Hit