The stock of JD.Com Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:JD) closed at $39.96 gaining 0.40% in yesterday’s trading session. This company has today made the announcement regarding the $19.1 billion generated from the shopping event sales. On the other hand, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) made a report of its one-day sales amounting to $25.35 billion. This figure represented a 39 percent rise from the figure recorded last year.
Singles’ Day has been expanding over the years and at the moment it is emerging to be one of the world’s biggest shopping events. Analysts have come forward to outline that it exceeds the combined sales for Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the United States.
The move by JD to kick start its sales event on Nov. 1 was in a bid to reduce delivery bottlenecks as well as offer users more time to make their purchasing decisions. Cosmetics and fresh foods were the retailer’s biggest movers, with JD selling 55 million facial masks and 500,000 Thailand black tiger shrimp over the period. The company outlined that it sold about 100 million yuan in televisions over a one-minute period and 500 million yuan in air conditioners over 30-minute duration.
An analyst following the market trends said, “As tills shut midnight on Saturday, Alibaba’s live sales ticker registered 168.3 billion yuan, up 39 percent from 120.7 billion yuan last year. The dollar figure was up more steeply due to the strength of the yuan against the greenback this year.”
It was at midnight that a deluge of pre-orders started trickling in and in just the first two minutes they were able to drive a billion dollars of sales on Alibaba’s platforms. Over a period of one hour they drove about $10 billion in sales.
The Shanghai-based principal at China Market Research Group, Ben Cavender, while speaking in relation to the matter said that in terms of scale it dwarfed all the events that had been going on out there.
Alibaba’s co-founder and vice chairman, Joseph Tsai, said that the event was indeed a big one for China.