Chinese Singles’ Day sales top 1 trillion yuan

The country’s annual shopping extravaganza dwarfs the US’ Black Friday and Cyber Monday put together

The Singles’ Day shopping festival in China has beaten expectations this year, with sales surpassing 1.1 trillion yuan for the first time ever, according to the Chinese consulting company Syntun.

Considered the world’s largest shopping event, Singles’ Day is celebrated in China every year on November 11, although there are usually two so-called ‘sales windows’ when goods can be purchased at a discount – at the end of October and on November 11 itself.

“Between 08:00 pm October 31 and 11:59 pm November 11, total sales of the major e-commerce platforms, including traditional e-commerce platforms and live streaming e-commerce platforms) were 1.115 trillion yuan {$156.9 billion},” Syntun, which has been tracking and publishing Singles’ Day sales data for nine years, said in its report.

Despite a decline in consumer confidence due to recurring Covid-19 lockdowns, this year’s event beat last year's 952 billion yuan ($131 billion), thus making it the largest in history.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba surprisingly opted not to disclose its sales results for Singles’ Day this year, saying only that the figures were in line with last year (540.3 billion yuan). Syntun’s statistics showed that during the entire sales event this year, Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace led the way among sales platforms with a 58.03% share of sales, followed by JD.com and Pingdo.

According to Syntun, one of the distinguishing features of this year's Singles’ Day was that goods were offered via live-streaming platforms, such as Douing (China's TikTok), DianTao (Alibaba’s live-streaming platform) and Kuaishou (a Chinese short-video app). Such sales reached 181.4 billion yuan.

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Meanwhile, famous US shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday pale in comparison to China’s Singles’ Day. For instance, last year they brought in only $8.9 billion and $10.7 billion, respectively.

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