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With a little help from the cloud, Alibaba sees record-breaking sales on China’s Singles’ Day
The Alibaba Group reported sales of $25.3 billion for Singles’ Day Nov. 11, a annual celebration of being single but even more of the country’s rampant consumerism.
That sum was 40 percent higher than on Singles’ Day in 2016. Although Singles’ Day is a decade old, only in 2009 did the e-commerce giant help to transform it into a shopping frenzy, much like Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. Those two days in America brought in sales of $12.8 billion in 2016, less than half of China’s biggest Singles’ Day ever.
Some $1.51 billion was spent in just three minutes, with electronic devices, clothes, household goods and beauty products being bought soon after Alibaba founder Jack Ma (pictured) opened the event with global celebrities such as Pharrell Williams and Nicole Kidman.
The growth in part signifies increased spending power in China, but can also be attributed to Alibaba’s expansion of cloud computing and its online payment systems. “We are very much relying on Alibaba Cloud to be a key service provider and enabler in the markets where Alibaba is targeting to grow,” Alibaba president Michael Evans told the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post. “That is very much in the same way Alipay has expanded hand in hand with our e-commerce business.”
It was reported that during the shopping frenzy Alibaba’s servers were dealing with 175,000 transactions a second. “It’s the day when the largest amount of computing power is needed in China,” He Yunfei, a senior product manager for Alibaba Cloud, told Bloomberg.
Alibaba dominates cloud computing in large part because the Chinese government won’t give foreign companies such as Amazon.com Inc. operating licenses for data centers. Although it’s reported that worldwide, Amazon has a 44 percent market share of cloud services and Alibaba just 3 percent, the Chinese company currently has data centers in the U.S. and a string of other countries.
The company said it’s now hoping to bring its international shopping platforms into one main hub utilizing the Alibaba Cloud and Alipay, competing with the likes of PayPal and Visa. AliExpress presently operates in about 200 countries. Although it was not responsible for this years’ massive Singles’ Day sales, the company is looking at global expansion.
Image: UNCTAD via Flickr
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