The numbers are in from Alibaba’s annual Singles’ Day online shopping event, and among the big winners are L’Oréal and Nestle.
As reported by Reuters on Tuesday (Nov. 12), the two brands were standouts in a day-long eCommerce event that brought in a total of $38.38 billion USD in sales.
To show the scale of Singles’ Day, that $38.38 billion tally is more than six times the amount that was brought in via online sales on Black Friday last year in the United States.
The most recent reading for Singles’ Day showed that sales growth came in at 26 percent year on year, which the newswire said was the slowest pace in the decade since the event began.
Some sell-side analysts on Wall Street had estimated the pace of sales growth to be in the low- to mid-20 percentage rates. As noted by Reuters, Citic Securities had put the pace at 20 percent to 25 percent, and Daiwa Capital Markets had pegged the growth rate at 23 percent.
“What’s happened is that you’ve had a lot of consumers this year being a little bit more careful about their purchasing because the economy’s slowing down,” Ben Cavender, managing director of consultancy China Market Research Group, told Reuters.
The Alibaba-sponsored event also featured live-streamed marketing of 1,000 brands. As noted in this space earlier in the week, within the first 90 minutes of the event, Alibaba’s GMV soared past $12 billion and exceeded the total reached on Singles Day in 2016.
The eCommerce giant said that 15 brands logged more than one billion yuan in sales, marked by firms such as Huawei Technologies, Fast Retailing’s Uniqlo and Apple.
As many as 299 brands sold more than 100 million yuan in GMV, a roster that includes LVMH’s Givenchy and sportswear firm Under Armour.
Drilling down into product categories, food supplements were the most popular imports bought during the event, while sales of makeup and diapers also showed strength.
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