Chinese consumers have spent billions of dollars shopping online for anything from diapers to diamonds on “Singles’ Day,” a day of promotions that has grown into the world’s biggest e-commerce event.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) yesterday said sales by the thousands of retailers on its platforms for the 24-hour period on Saturday amounted to 168.3 billion yuan (US$25.34 billion), setting a new record for the company.
It was 39 percent more than last year’s Nov. 11 sales on Alibaba’s platforms of 120.7 billion yuan.
By comparison, US shoppers last year spent more than US$5 billion shopping online on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, a day of discounts the day after the national holiday, according to Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks such data.
US shoppers last year also spent US$3.39 billion on Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and the largest single online shopping day in the US, Adobe said.
In China, Alibaba’s main rival, online retailer JD.com Inc (京東), did not provide a sales figure for Saturday, but said cumulative sales over the 11-day period starting on Nov. 1 through Saturday totaled 127 billion yuan (US$19 billion).
Starting at midnight on Friday, diamonds, Chilean frozen salmon, tires, diapers, beer, shoes, handbags and appliances were shipped out from JD.com’s distribution centers on trucks bound for deliveries countrywide.
China is already the world’s largest e-commerce market and the online share of consumer spending grows every year.
Boston Consulting Group has forecast that Chinese online sales will rise 20 percent a year to US$1.6 trillion by 2020, compared with 6 percent growth for offline retail.
The spending gives a boost to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to nurture consumer-based economic growth, and reduce reliance on trade and investment.
China has 731 million Internet users, up 6 percent from last year, government statistics showed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day