Alibaba shuttered the tills on its biggest Singles Day shopping festival to date — a $25.4bn haul that saw Chinese shoppers snap up more than $1bn worth of mobile phones, shoes and lipsticks every hour, underlining the strength of consumer sentiment.
More than 777m parcels were shipped in what has become the biggest day by far in the global retail calendar. “It speaks to the upgrading of consumption in China,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive of the Chinese tech group.
It is also a measure of the explosive growth witnessed in China. Alibaba has turned Singles Day — numerically written as 11.11 — into an event many times bigger than any US shopping day sales. The company is now one of the 10 most valuable in the world.