China’s second largest e-commerce platform, JD.com announced on Sunday that its June 18 anniversary sale, a.k.a. the “JD 618”, had over 100 million orders placed from June 1 to 18. Females accounted for 61% of consumers. Orders on the day of June 18 achieved a YoY growth of 60%, with 85% of orders having been placed on mobile devices.
Shen Haoyu, CEO of JD Mall, said that the JD 618 anniversary sale has existed for 10 years, and while the 618 sale in 2013 saw three million orders in total, June 18 2016 achieved that number almost in the first hour. Additionally, this year is the first time that sales of general merchandise surpassed that of clothing.
Data from JD.com show that JD Supermarket sold 25 million products; the two most popular brands on the day were Blue Moon and Nestle. JD Worldwide, a platform where shoppers can access overseas brands and sellers, had a YoY growth of 1700%, with baby products achieving a YoY growth of 2000%. From June 1st to 18th, the sales of fresh food on JD.com increased five times compared with last year’s levels.
Many online shoppers decided to seize the “618” opportunity to change smartphones. Brands including Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi all grabbed a sales volume surpassing RMB 100 million (USD 15.2 million) respectively. In addition, an OPPO R9 smartphone signed by FC Barcelona was auctioned off at RMB 88,914, breaking the price records for smartphones on JD.com. From June 1st until 22:00 on the last day, LeEco sold 1,672,000 smartphones.
According to JD’s financial report for 2015, the annual revenue of RMB 462.7 billion was a YoY growth of 78%. Now running 213 bulk warehouses nationwide that cover 50 cities, and having over 99,000 third-party stores, the company was valued at RMB 46.64 billion during a round of financing earlier this year.
Alibaba-backed e-commerce giant (and JD competitor) Tmall set a world record of RMB 91.2 billion for overall transactions during one day, on China’s Double 11 “Singles’ Day” shopping festival in 2015. This day has sometimes been dubbed “China’s Black Friday”, but the trade during “Singles’ Day” in China is three times higher than the Black Friday revenue in America.
(Top photo from Baidu Images)