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Jane Zhang

In just the first 68 seconds of November 11, shoppers spent US$1 billion on Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces, scooping up everything from consumer electronics to luxury items and even cars.
By the end of the annual 24-hour Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza, the Chinese tech giant reported a record-shattering 268.4 billion yuan (US$38.4 billion) of sales.
All of this took place with “zero downtime” thanks to its cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement on Wednesday.
Alibaba Cloud is the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, which is also the parent company of the ﻿South China Morning Post.
The cloud service provider applied “multiple mature innovations to power the cloud infrastructure and other key AI-enabled features, enabling millions of businesses to reach hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide”, it said in the statement.
Consumers from China’s smaller cities lift Alibaba to Singles’ Day record
Here are some of the key points from the statement:

Alibaba’s third-generation X-Dragon cloud architecture used servers that were seamlessly integrated with computing platforms, helping it process large volumes of transactions with zero downtime.
At its peak, the company’s Apsara Operating System supported a record 544,000 orders per second using advanced data processing and analytic capabilities.
Despite the record sales, energy consumption at Alibaba’s data centre dropped 70 per cent from the previous year, saving more than 200,000 kilowatt hours of energy on Singles’ Day using cooling technologies developed by Alibaba Cloud.
The machine translation service for Alibaba’s cross-border e-commerce platform, AliExpress, was used 1.66 billion times during the shopping festival with over 200 billion words translated in different languages.
More than one million orders were placed and processed through voice command using smart speaker Tmall Genie, “a sign that voice shopping has become an increasingly popular trend among Chinese consumers” according to Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba held its first Singles’ Day shopping event in 2009 as a promotional campaign, but it has since morphed into a show of China’s collective consumer spending power.
The name comes from the date of the event, which written numerically as 11/11 looks like “bare branches”, a Chinese expression for the single and unattached. As a kind of antidote to the societal pressures of being in a relationship, many of China’s singles have begun splurging on themselves on Singles’ Day, and it has come to be seen as a type of anti-Valentine’s Day.

For more insights into China tech, sign up for our tech newsletters, subscribe to our award-winning Inside China Tech podcast, and download the comprehensive 2019 China Internet Report. Also roam China Tech City, an award-winning interactive digital map at our sister site Abacus.



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Alibaba

How Alibaba powered billions of transactions on Singles' Day with ‘zero downtime’

A screen displays the transaction volume of the 24-hour Alibaba Singles' Day global shopping festival at the company's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China. Photo: Reuters

Consumers from China’s smaller cities lift Alibaba to new Singles’ Day record as buyers shrug off trade war

A display set up at an event in Hangzhou for China’s Singles’ Day sales campaign shows sales on Alibaba Group’s e-commerce platform hitting 10 billion yuan (about US$1.43 billion) just 1 minute and 36 seconds after midnight. Photo: Kyodo

Alibaba's annual 11.11 Countdown Gala Celebration for 2019 was broadcast live from the Shanghai Mercedes-Benz Arena. Photo: Handout

How Alibaba’s Singles’ Day became a global billion dollar shopping festival – and what ‘11.11’ means for luxury brands

The total figure spent is displayed on the big screen in Shanghai during the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival in 2018, when a new record was set – and is likely to be broken in 2019. Photo: Simon Song

Jack Ma Yun, Chairman of Alibab Group, appears in a promotional TV program acting as a online cosmetic promoter, displayed at the news center of the 2018 Tmall Double 11 Gala (Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival) in Shanghai, on Saturday evening, Nov.10, 2018. 10NOV18 SCMP / Simon Song

Mariah Carey performs at the 2018 Tmall Double 11 Gala (Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival) in Shanghai, on Saturday evening, Nov.10, 2018. The shopping festival will formally start at midnight Saturday. 10NOV18 SCMP / Simon Song

People select watches on an electronic screen at a T-Mall exhibition during the Singles Day shopping festival in Shanghai on November 11, 2017. - China's smartphone-wielding masses unleashed billions of dollars in e-commerce spending November 11 as they rushed to snap up bargains on "Singles Day" -- billed as the world's biggest one-day online shopping festival. (Photo by STR / AFP) / China OUT

For its pioneering Genius project, Moncler replaces its seasonal campaigns with monthly collections in collaboration with forward-thinking fashion designers such as Craig Green and Hiroshi Fujiwara. SCMP Pictures (UNDATED HANDOUT)

The big screen shows the GMV (gross merchandise volume) exceeding RMB 10 billion in 125 seconds at the news center of the 2018 Tmall Double 11 Gala (Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival) in Shanghai, on Saturday evening, Nov.10, 2018. 11NOV18 SCMP / Simon Song

Members of the eFounders Fellowship from southeast Asian countries selfie while watching the Shopping Festival a the news center of the 2018 Tmall Double 11 Gala (Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival) in Shanghai, on Saturday evening, Nov.10, 2018. 11NOV18 SCMP / Simon Song

What do Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Alibaba and Chinese Singles’ Day shoppers have in common?

Alibaba’s massive 11.11 countdown party included American singer Taylor Swift performing a mini-concert.

Jackson Yee. Alibaba

Tech

Big Tech


Shoppers spent a record US$38.4 billion on Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces on November 11 this year
At its peak, the company’s Apsara Operating System supported a record 544,000 orders per second



The record spending on Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces on November 11 this year was supported by cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence technology, according to Alibaba Cloud.


How Alibaba powered billions of transactions on Singles' Day with ‘zero downtime’

Shoppers spent a record US$38.4 billion on Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces on November 11 this year At its peak, the company’s Apsara Operating System supported a record 544,000 orders per second

Shoppers spent a record US$38.4 billion on Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces on November 11 this year

At its peak, the company’s Apsara Operating System supported a record 544,000 orders per second