E-commerce giant Alibaba claims that over the last 24-hour of its Double 11 shopping festival, it made RMB 91.2billion (USD 14.3billion), which is almost double the amount witnessed last year when sales reached RMB 57 billion.
The Double 11 shopping festival started with a grand beginning producing RMB 100 million in 18 seconds. It soon soared to RMB one billion at one minute and 12 seconds. As of 7:45 this morning, the Double 11 sales festival has achieved revenue of RMB 41.7 billion, which is equivalent to the revenue generated in 2014 for Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.
Another significant indicator is that 82% of the first one billion in revenue was generated via mobile phone. This proves Alibaba’s efforts in mobile e-commerce have not gone unnoticed.
The peak transaction amount at Ant Financial was 85,000 transactions per second, 2.2 times the peak transaction amount for last year. As of 1 o’clock this morning the maximum number of simultaneous online users shopping on Alibaba was 45 million. It’s reported that Alibaba, Ant Financial’s Financial Cloud computing technology and Oceanbase played a significant role in handling the transactions.
Alibaba’s logistics network, Cainiao Network – one of its focuses for the next couple of years – has also presented some impressive stats: Cainiao had received 200 million orders as of 8:22 this morning, nine hours earlier than last year.
Meizu was notably first among Alibaba’s flagship stores to hit RMB 100 million. Of the first five stores to reach RMB 100 million, three were smartphone brands: Meizu, Xiaomi & Huawei.
In sharp contrast to Alibaba, Tencent-backed rival JD.com has been relatively quiet this morning. According to published record, JD.com’s television gala event attracted 2.6% of the total television viewing population while Alibaba’s gala event attracted 28.4%.
Alibaba’s stock price has climbed slightly following the news of its outstanding performance during its sales event. Earlier this week, leading hedge fund manager Jim Chanos proposed shorting Alibaba stock, which caused the stock price to fall by four dollars. In spite of the successes seen with the Double 11 sales festival, Alibaba will still need to face the challenge of a fallen stock price following the event.
