Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has said that it generated approximately $25 billion (€21.5 billion) worth of gross merchandise volume on the annual 'Singles Day' shopping event, which took place on Saturday (11 November).
The group said that this amounted to an increase of 39% compared to 2016, making this year's event the biggest yet.
"More than $25 billion of GMV in one day is not just a sales figure," said Daniel Zhang, Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group.
"It represents the aspiration for quality consumption of the Chinese consumer, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully embraced the integration of online and offline retail."
Major Event
Alibaba said that this year's event saw more than 140,000 participating brands and merchants, while the group's Alipay service processed 1.48 billion total payment transactions, up 41% from 2016; and processed 256,000 transactions per second at peak times.
The top international sellers to China for the event hailed from Japan, United States, Australia, Germany, South Korea, it added.
Alibaba said that the first $2 billion worth of sales were registered in the first two minutes of the Singles Day event kicking off.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
