New | Calling all the single ladies: Alibaba’s Singles’ Day shopping spree set to hit new sales record despite slowdown in China’s retail growth

Online shopping giant to bring in new brands, offline retailers and promote products overseas for Chinese consumers’ biggest annual shopping spree on November 11

Reading Time:3 minutes

A giant billboard promoting this year’s Singles’ Day shopping festival in Beijing subway. Photo: Simon Song

Published: 9:30am, 10 Nov 2015Updated: 10:58am, 10 Nov 2015

With giant billboards in subways, posters plastered in elevators, advertisements splashed across newspapers and magazines, and commercials repeatedly being screened during primetime TV and radio programmes, it’s hard to miss the arrival of China’s “Singles’ Day” shopping festival.

The online shopping extravaganza on November 11, started seven years ago by e-commerce giant Alibaba, has become Chinese consumers’ biggest annual shopping spree.

READ MORE: Singles' Day explained: How China's celebration of the lonely became a shopping orgy bigger than Christmas

Despite a gloomy economic outlook as growth slows in the country’s retail industry, this year’s Singles’ Day shopping festival is expected to set yet another new record in takings.

Last year, Alibaba saw a staggering 57.1 billion yuan (HK$69.5 billion) of sales on T-mall and Taobao on November 11. Another major e-commerce site, JD.com, sold out nearly 40 million pieces of products in 24 hours that day.

Chinese postal workers sort out the flurry of packages to send out from their dispatch centre on November 11, Singles’ Day, last year. Photo: Xinhua

“The Singles’ Day shopping festival is growing bigger every year. The importance of this date for the local retail sector is rising so quickly that it’s diluting the impact of traditional sales windows like the Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival,” said Jason Yu, general manager of consumer research unit Kantar Worldpanel China.

“Still, it would be hard for the incremental shopping sales brought by the online sales event to offset the decline in growth of the entire retail sector.”

The retail sector’s growth has been sliding in recent years. Total retail sales rose 10.5 per cent to 21.6 trillion yuan for the first three quarters of the year, compared with a 12 per cent increase last year and 13 per cent in 2013.