Alibaba breaks 'Singles Day' record, racking up $18 billion in sales in just 12 hours
The company has a running sales counter on its Alizila
news website, which details the "gross merchandise volume" that it has
fulfilled orders for so far. It's currently just after noon in China and
the company has already surpassed last year's sales for Singles Day
with nearly $18 billion USD in merchandise sold already, about $7 billion of which was sold in the first 30 minutes of the day.
The
company reached $17.8 billion in sales by day's end in 2016 so there's
plenty more orders to be made with just under 12 hours to go.
Singles
Day, a Chinese holiday that's sort of the single person's response to
Valentine's Day, is, at its core, a day to treat yourself. Alibaba
didn't invent the holiday, but since 2009 they have come to draw the
bulk of global attention for the mind-blowing sales they manage to pull
off. It's similar in theory to events like Amazon's Prime Day, though
the scope is much more expansive for Alibaba's popular Tmall and Taobao
online storefronts which offer a number of deals to entice shoppers.
Smashing
through last year's Singles Day sales will obviously be a great signal
for the company which has been having a pretty great year already.
Alibaba has more than doubled its stock price since this time last year,
now sitting on a market cap north of $475 billion.
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