In Hangzhou, the capital of the Chinese province of Zhejiang, the electronic marker of the headquarters of the giant Alibaba is already prepared to give the kick-off to the world’s largest online shopping festival. Welcome to the 11 of the 11, to the Bachelor’s day, to Chinese Black Friday. The largest consumer spectacle sponsored by a country that calls itself communist. The largest barometer to measure the health of the pockets of the second world economy.
China is hungry for consumption. You need your citizens to devour the barrage of offers from e-commerce companies to strike a blow at the depleted global playground and show that it is true that it is recovering like no other country from the economic aftermath of the pandemic. To do this, the Asian giant will dress up by mixing entertainment and sales programs on digital platforms that lead consumers to break last year’s purchase record: 35,000 million euros in 24 hours.
November 11, 2019.5 billion consumers made 540,000 transactions per second starring in the biggest shopping show ever seen in such a short time, doubling the pace of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For Wednesday, the father of this party, Alibaba, predicts that the figures will be exceeded last year.
The electronics giant founded by Jack Ma needs to get up later the failed IPO from Ant Group, parent of Alipay, the company’s payment platform. Last week the Chinese government overthrew what was going to be the largest IPO (29.2 billion euros) in history -with the excuse that fintech did not meet the requirements for the operation-, also causing Ma’s empire a 7% collapse a few days ago on the Hong Kong stock market.
However, the good news for Alibaba was that beat analyst estimates of its third quarter sales, increasing its income by 30% (19,846 million euros), mainly thanks to the local market. In China, which is experiencing a normality very similar to that which existed before the pandemic, Communist Party politicians have long encouraged domestic consumption, which is the source of 57.8% of the country’s wealth. The proposal that came out at the end of October from the meeting of Chinese leaders to draft the XIV Plan Quinquenal, that will set the course for the economy of the second world power until 2025, was to promote the internal market in search of self-sufficiency.
Bachelor’s day
Now Singles Day is coming and millions of mobiles are fuming with online offers. Discounts began in early November and sales records were already set during the first hours. In 111 minutes, Alibaba made 12 million euros in transactions. The Chinese company said it would introduce two million new products, double the number last year.
Eleven years ago, Daniel Zhang, who replaced founder Jack Ma last year as Alibaba’s top manager but was then a company manager, came up with a holiday that they had invented in the 90s four students from Nanjign University to celebrate their singleness by giving each other gifts. A kind of “anti Valentine”. Little by little, Alibaba -with its subsidiary AliExpress- was turning this date into an obligatory shopping day until it became a golden day for Chinese e-commerce.
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