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Infograph: Alibaba's Singles Day Sales Break Record At $31 Billion Sales across Alibaba's platforms crossed last year's $30.45 billion (213.5 billion yuan) record

By Aparajita Saxena

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

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The 11th edition of Alibaba's Singles Day shopping festival set a new record of $31 billion in sales in 2019, as shoppers hunted for deep bargains on consumer items from clothes and cosmetics to electronic goods and home improvement items.

To boost sales against the backdrop of a slowing Chinese economy, as well as trepidation of dwindling demand for goods from the United States because of the tariff spat, Alibaba expanded the number of discounted items and roped in celebrities and social media influencers to publicise products via live streaming.

Alibaba launched Singles Day in 2009, as a counter to Valentine's Day. Its first event saw participation from just 27 merchants, a BBC report said. Since then, the company has broken its own sales records multiple times, even surpassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

Alibaba had earlier said it expected nearly half a billion shoppers on Singles Day, from across the world, including China, where consumption needs in low-tier cities has risen over the last two years.

Of the 226 million new mobile monthly active users that joined Alibaba's online shopping website, Taobao, over the last two years, 70 percent were from lower-tier areas, as of June 2019, the company said.

To meet consumer demand from lower-tier areas, Alibaba has been helping factories in China become more technologically savvy by giving them access to analytics tools, IoT capabilities, and marketing tools, to make their manufacturing processes efficient and meet demands of consumers from the lower-tier areas.

Aparajita Saxena

Former Deputy Associate Editor, Asia Pacific

Aparajita is Former Deputy Associate Editor for Entrepreneur Asia Pacific. She joined Entrepreneur after nearly five years with Reuters, where she chased the Asian and U.S. finance markets.

At Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, she wrote about trends in the Asia Pacific startup ecosystem. She also loves to look for problems startups face in their day-to-day and tries to present ways to deal with those issues via her stories, with inputs from other startups that may have once been in that boat.

Outside of work, she likes spending her time reading books (fiction/non-fiction/back of a shampoo bottle), chasing her two dogs around the house, exploring new wines, solo-travelling, laughing at memes, and losing online multiplayer battle royale games.

 

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