Alibaba Sets Singles' Day Record With $31 Billion in Sales

Alibaba logged 213.5 billion yuan ($30.7 billion) in sales for its annual Singles’ Day extravaganza setting a record, according to Bloomberg.

China’s largest company, which used a concurrent televised entertainment spectacle featuring Cirque du Soleil and Mariah Carey to further drum up business, reported that Xiaomi, Apple and Dyson products were the top three brands in early sales. The annual retail celebration, originally dedicated to the nation’s unattached, has become an important bellwether not just for the company, but also the country.

This year’s Nov. 11 gala offers a glimpse of consumer sentiment in China as U.S. tensions and a tit-for-tat tariff war depress stock markets and threaten to dampen the world’s No. 2 economy. Alibaba surpassed the 100 billion yuan mark less than two hours into Singles’ Day, according to Alibaba’s news website. “We can feel that merchants are fully embracing the internet and helping with consumption upgrade,“ Daniel Zhang , Alibaba’s CEO, told reporters in Shanghai.

The challenge for billionaire Jack Ma and Zhang, his lieutenant, was to notch another record after a scorching decade-long run. With a cooling economy, saturated markets and competition from smaller platforms such as JD and Pinduoduo, Alibaba is seeking new growth engines. In the first hour of this year’s Singles’ Day, the top countries selling to China were Japan, the U.S. and South Korea, and the most popular items purchased overseas were dresses, wool coats, pants and hoodies.

Singles’ Day was the brainchild of co-founder Ma and Zhang, who came up with the idea of turning the counter-cultural holiday into a shopfest a decade ago. First popularized by college students, Nov. 11 emerged as an antidote to the sentimentality of Valentine’s Day. It takes its name from the way the day is written numerically as 11/11, which resembles “bare branches,“ a local expression for the unattached. Now, it’s become an excuse for people to shop, eat and binge on entertainment shows. It’s become so enormous that packaging waste and potential damage to the environment remain lingering issues.