Singles Day: Alibaba Sales Skyrocket

(RTTNews) - On 11:11 or China's Guanggun Jie or Singles Day, Alibaba set new records in sales. It is said to be the world's largest online shopping event.

Alibaba claimed online sales of around 10 billion yuan equivalent to $1.47 billion at seven minutes past midnight China Standard Time on Friday. The company noted that the surge in sales minutes after midnight was a reflection of pre-orders from pump-priming promotions.

During the first hour, order volumes peaked to 175 thousand orders in one second, while its cloud computing subsidiary managed to process 140 thousand orders per second. Alibaba claimed that there were transactions from 207 countries and regions.

At 12 midnight Chinese Standard Time, the global shopping festival collected gross merchandise volume of RMB 120.7 billion or $17.8 billion.

Alibaba Group President Michael Evans said, "The demand for international products continues to be very strong, the value proposition for Chinese consumers for international products continues to be enormous."

David Beckham and Victoria Beckham were the promoters of Alibaba on the single heart's day. When Alibaba launched it is 2009, there were only 27 merchants and this year there are more than 100 thousand merchants including 11 thousand international merchants.