Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) completed the best weekly rally last week since its US debut amid prospects that holiday-season sales would help bolster the market dominance of China’s largest e-commerce operator.
Now the Hangzhou-based company is expecting its sales during this year’s Nov. 11 Singles’ Day shopping event to surge 40 percent from a year earlier to almost 50 billion yuan (US$8.2 billion), driven by increased mobile transactions, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
Tomorrow’s shopping day, a modern Chinese take on Valentine’s Day, “was formerly mainly a domestic market thing, but now the company provides a convenient channel for domestic consumers to shop online and communicate with international brands and manufacturers,” Vancouver-based JG Capital Corp senior analyst Henry Guo (郭琪) said by telephone on Friday.
On Nov. 11 last year, Alibaba sales surged 84 percent to a record 35 billion yuan from 2012. The company launched its first Singles’ Day online promotions in 2009 with about 1 billion yuan in sales.
While Alibaba tended to promote its Tmall.com (天貓) retail platform in previous years for Singles’ Day, it plans to focus on pushing Taobao Marketplace (淘寶) along with cross-border transactions this year, said Cheng Cheng (程程), an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities LLC in Portland, Oregon. “We expect a much bigger Singles’ Day this year versus previous years.”
Taiwanese leading online beauty brand 86 Shop (86小舖), which opened a shop on Tmall last year, that stresses direct delivery from Taiwan, is optimistic about its Singles’ Day sales this year, with general manager Nick Wang (王閔麒) forecasting a 50 percent year-on-year growth to more than NT$23 million (US$752,100).
Other e-commerce companies in Taiwan, including PChome Online Inc (網路家庭) and the Taiwan unit of Japan’s Rakuten Inc, are also set to begin online promotions on Singles’ Day.
Additional reporting by CNA
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