Alibaba’s Singles’ Day tops Nike, adidas annual revenues
China’s Alibaba-powered Singles’ Day - or Double 11 - annual shopping festival reached $74.1 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2020, Alibaba announced. 2019’s figure was $38.4 billion.
In comparison, Nike’s annual sales revenue for 2019 was $37.2 billion. Adidas’ figure for the same period was €23.6 billion. Online sales for 2019’s Black Friday in the US amounted to $7.4 billion, with Cyber Monday reaching $9.4 billion in the same year.
Singles’ Day 2020, as the first large-scale shopping event to run in post-pandemic China, was an 11-day event with two shopping windows. The first window ran from November 1 to 3, with the second live for 24 hours on November 11. (The $74.1 billion GMV figure takes both windows into account.)
Singles’ Day is thought to have been started by four bachelors at Nanjing University in 1993, as a form of protest against China’s Double Seventh festival (also known as Qixi festival or Chinese Valentine’s Day), which traditionally falls on the seventh day of the seventh Chinese lunar month.
The pronunciation of 11.11 (hence the name Double 11, an alternate name for Singles’ Day) in Mandarin Chinese sounds similar to a Chinese idiom meaning “a whole lifetime” or “all my life”. It also looks like four single people standing in a line.
An additional name for Singles’ Day is Bare Sticks Day, which promotes the idea that single people in China are akin to lonely sticks who will never add to the family tree.
Alibaba launched its shopper-friendly version of Singles’ Day in 2009, apparently in celebration of the unattached. Really, though, an Alibaba representative explained, November 11 was a convenient date for holding a big online sale during a holiday lull in China.
While sales were common in the run-up to China’s National Day (October 1), then again before Spring Festival (usually held during the first two months of the Gregorian calendar year), there was no recurring retail sales period around autumn time.
Today, the Alibaba-trademarked Double 11 ‘holiday’ is a shopping bonanza for all, including Alibaba’s competitors (the most prominent of which, JD.com, has also promoted Singles’ Day as a discounted shopping frenzy since 2010).
Image: Alizila.
