Chinese shoppers snapped up food supplements, facial masks and baby milk powder at the world’s largest shopping festival, with brands such as L’Oreal and Nestle among the biggest winners, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) data showed.
The Chinese e-commerce giant’s annual Singles’ Day shopping blitz on Monday brought in a record 268.4 billion yuan (US$38.38 billion) in sales, more than six times the amount of online sales made in the US on Black Friday last year.
Alibaba yesterday said that 299 brands surpassed 100 million yuan in gross merchandise value, among them smartphone makers Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Apple Inc, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE’s Givenchy, home appliance makers Dyson Ltd and Royal Philips NV and sportswear makers Nike Inc and Under Armour Inc.
Food supplements were the most popular import product, while sales of makeup, diapers and face wash were also strong.
Sales growth for the annual shopping festival this year eased to 26 percent, the weakest since the event started in 2009, in a reflection of how e-commerce sales in China have been slowing.
However, analysts said the growth rate had slightly beaten their expectations, saying that more aggressive promotions, a focus on attracting more customers from rural cities, and even the overall slowing economy might have helped, as people sought to buy goods at discounted prices.
Citic Securities Co (中信證券) had predicted a 20 to 25 percent expansion, while Daiwa Capital Markets Inc had an estimate of 23 percent.
“What’s happened is that you’ve had a lot of consumers this year being a little bit more careful about their purchasing, because the economy’s slowing down,” said Ben Cavender, managing director of consultancy China Market Research Group.
“I think this year especially, people were kind of waiting for Singles’ Day and kind of waiting to make some of those medium-sized purchases that they didn’t want to pay full price for,” he said.
Liu Xingliang (劉興亮), Internet analyst at DCCI Data Center, who was among guests invited to Alibaba’s headquarters on the day of the event, said the firm’s efforts to reach smaller, lower-tier cities with real bargains played a significant role.
“I saw them selling electronic toothbrushes at 9.9 yuan, and 65-inch TV sets at 1,800 yuan. People in lower-tier cities and towns can afford these products and in fact, they like big TVs more than city people, because they usually have larger houses,” Liu said.
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