Singles’ Day takings fail to boost November retail figures in China
Indicators released by Beijing show retail sales figures remained steady while industrial output rose 6.1 per cent last month
Singles’ Day on November 11 might have amassed a whopping 168 billion yuan (US$25.3 billion) in sales, but the popular shopping festival failed to lift China’s overall figures for November.
According to data released by China’s statistics bureau on Thursday, November’s retail sales in the world’s second-biggest economy were 3.41 trillion yuan, a slight drop from 3.42 trillion yuan in October, the National Bureau of Statistics figures showed. While sales last month were 10.2 per cent higher than a year earlier, growth rate has fallen below an average of 10.3 per cent so far this year.
Singles’ Day, China’s version of the US’s Black Friday, is seen as a measure of the spending power of Chinese consumers, but its impact on total retail sales figures, which covers both consumer and corporate spending, was limited this year.
On November 11, the volume of sales transactions on platforms run by Alibaba, which in 2009 turned the celebration of single people into a festival of shopping, amounted to 168 billion yuan over 24 hours, or double the online sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Meanwhile, the launch of the iPhone X last month lifted sales of “telecom equipment” in China.