Alibaba Makes Over $30 Billion In Single-Day Sale

Chinese e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba held it’s annual Singles’ Day sale on November 11th across its various online shopping platforms. If you don’t know, Singles’ Day is a shopping holiday like Black Friday, albeit at a far large scale, with several billion spent every year at the absolute minimum. Alibaba set the tone for this year’s sale when they broke $1 billion in sales within the 85 seconds of the event’s start.

In 2017, Alibaba’s gross merchandise value (a statistic representing total sales across platforms) stood at 168.2 billion Chinese yuan at the end of Singles’ Day, approximately $25.3 billion USD. This year’s sale absolutely dwarfed last year’s, however, with the final GMV standing at a mighty 213.5 billion yuan, approximately $30.8 billion USD. I would like to reiterate that this was the profit earned in a single day. This represents a 27% rise in profit for Alibaba, though that is smaller than the 39% rise from 2016 to 2017.

Alibaba had discounts on a variety of goods and services through its platforms, with deals not just on its regular retail sites, but also on food and grocery delivery. The sale was framed by a massive gala event that began on Saturday night and ran through the entirety of Sunday that featured appearances by multiple celebrities. Alibaba’s CEO Daniel Zheng believes that the current trade tensions between China and the US provides an opportunity to bring more business to companies and services that have been negatively impacted.

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