China's Singles Day festival wraps up with e-commerce giants reporting sales growth
By Casey Hall
SHANGHAI (Reuters) -China's largest e-commerce player Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) Group said it recorded year-on-year growth over this year's Singles Day sales period that ended at midnight on Saturday, while rival JD (NASDAQ:JD).com reported sales volumes at a record high.
Data provider Syntun, meanwhile, estimated cumulative gross merchandising volume (GMV) sales across major e-commerce platforms rose 2.08% to 1.14 trillion yuan ($156.40 billion) compared with growth of 2.9% last year.
Originally a 24-hour online shopping event held on Nov. 11 each year in China, the Singles Day festival — a nod to the digits in the date — has expanded into weeks of promotions across the country's major e-commerce platforms and in bricks-and-mortar stores.
Expectations for sales growth for the festival, which is viewed as a gauge of consumer confidence, were subdued this year as the economy struggles to recover.
Last year, when China was emerging from COVID-19 curbs, Alibaba, the country's largest e-commerce player by market share, did not disclose the yuan value of its sales for the festival for the first time.
Again this year, it said only that sales were positive, without giving details, for its e-commerce platforms Tmall and Taobao.
Alibaba, put pressure on merchants to price aggressively this Singles Day, and at the start of the festival in late October, said it would offer 80 million products at their deepest discount of the year.
Analysts saw this as an attempt to fight back against rivals such as Douyin and PDD Holdings' Pinduoduo (NASDAQ:PDD) that have changed the landscape of Chinese e-commerce in recent years by selling lower-cost and discounted items year-round.
Discounts of 40%-50% were much more common than in
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