10 years on: Singles’ Day is ‘Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Black Friday all wrapped into one’
- This year, Alibaba is aiming to make its Singles’ Day extravaganza bigger than ever, with 180,000 participating brands
- For the first time, Alibaba is also including many of its offline and online partners and affiliates, such as New Retail supermarket chain Hema
Like many young, educated white-collar employees in the bustling technology hub of Shenzhen, weekends are precious days of rest for Jeff Guo, a 30-year old operations manager in a Shenzhen start-up. On weekends, Guo can be found having a hearty meal with friends, singing his heart out at a karaoke lounge or playing mahjong till the wee hours of the morning.
But since October, having the weekends off has been a rarity for Guo. In recent weeks he has had to work overtime – as much as seven days a week – as his company gears up for the upcoming Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza, where merchants around the country slash prices on their wares and Chinese consumers splurge tens of billions of dollars shopping online.
Guo’s employer, Shenzhen Huishenghuiying Technology, which manufactures popular home cinema-related products, has taken part in the Singles’ Day festival for the last five years. This year is no different, and Guo busies himself making sure that the company has enough inventory and that its promotions will run smoothly as the year’s busiest workday draws nearer.
Singles’ Day, which falls on November 11 and celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, started out as a sort of anti-Valentines’ Day, when single Chinese university students began spending money on nice things for themselves in defiance of society’s pressures to be in a relationship.
Catching on to the trend, e-commerce firm Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, in 2009 launched its first ever Singles’ Day shopping festival, where participating merchants would offer discounts to consumers.
The 2009 shopping festival gathered around 52 million yuan (US$7.5 million) in sales – but just five years later this had skyrocketed over 1,000 times to 57 billion yuan in sales. Last year, it hit a record 168 billion yuan over a 24-hour period of frenzied shopping – eclipsing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the US by four times.
Sales during the Singles’ Day period are critical for merchants like Huishenghuiying, as the revenue from the two-week period in November, when merchants start offering discounts to consumers, can make up a critical part of its annual revenue.