Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) expects to surpass the record US$14.3 billion in sales it made on Singles’ Day last year by rolling out new activities like virtual fashion shows and augmented reality games to entice shoppers.
“The numbers will be big and they’ll be bigger than last year,” Alibaba president Michael Evans told Bloomberg TV at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.
He said the numbers are not the company’s main focus.
“If the social experience isn’t a great event for all the people who participate, then we haven’t really achieved what we want,” Evans added.
Singles’ Day, a twist on Valentine’s Day, started in the 1990s and has become a Chinese consumer phenomenon since Alibaba turned it into a one-day online sales extravaganza in 2009. The event is an example of how e-commerce companies can manufacture consumer demand through promotions, like Amazon.com Inc’s “Prime Day.”
Alibaba has a number of strategies to ensure the spike in sales during the first few seconds of Nov. 11. This year, it is adding more activities to get products preloaded into consumers’ digital shopping carts. At midnight, those transactions are completed through the company’s Alipay payments service.
On Sunday, Alibaba is to live stream an eight-hour fashion show in Shanghai with 50 international brands, during which viewers can preorder clothes.
Alibaba is also to release an augmented reality mobile game two weeks before Singles’ Day. Consumers are expected to follow a “Tmall Cat” mascot to merchants around China to earn discounts.
Investors closely watch the results of Singles’ Day. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has been looking at data reported from the promotion last year, Alibaba said in its annual report in May.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last