Billion in 68 seconds: Alibaba exceeds Amazon’s quarterly sales in one day

On the day of sales on November 11 (11.11, “the day of bachelors”), Chinese Internet giant Alibaba surpassed its last year record by a quarter, follows from the data of the South China Morning Post.

Sales only in the first hour of the discount day ($ 12 billion) almost equalled the results of last year’s “Black Friday” ($ 6.2 billion) and “cyber Monday” ($ 7.9 billion) in the United States – combined. About 500 million people made purchases on the platform.

• Goods worth $ 1 billion were sold in the first 68 seconds of the action, $ 10 billion – in the first half-hour. In 16.5 hours, the record result of 2018 was exceeded – $ 30.8 billion.
• At the end of the day, the largest online sale in the world reached $ 38.4 billion. This is more than Amazon online sales for the entire third quarter of 2019 ($ 35 billion).
• One of the best-selling products at the same time were Huawei’s Mate 30 Pro 5G smartphones and Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro.
• This is the first day of Alibaba sales after the departure of its founder, Jack Ma, from operational management.

Alibaba held its first sale on the “anti-Valentine’s day” in 2009 and in a few years turned it into the largest in the world. This year, the company planned an IPO in Hong Kong for $ 15 billion, but it was foiled by massive protests.

The dynamics of sales shows that at least consumer demand in China was not affected by the trade conflict with the United States. Their year-on-year growth was almost the same (25%) as in 2018 (27%), although analysts predicted a greater slowdown. It is also significant that sales of goods by American companies did not slow down.