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The biggest Chinese company, which is trying to gain ground thanks to a simultaneous televised entertainment show featuring Cirque du Soleil and Mariah Carey, announced that Xiaomi, Apple and Dyson products were the top three brands sold at the beginning.
The annual celebration of the retail trade, originally dedicated to the nation's single people, has become an important indicator, not only for society, but also for the country. The gala on November 11 this year provides insight into consumer sentiment in China, as tensions in the United States and a deadly tariff war depress the stock markets and threaten to dampen the world's second-largest economy.
Alibaba nevertheless intends to beat growth of 39% in 2017 and 168 billion yuan of transactions, an incredible result that denied Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
Scorching Run
Billionaire Jack Ma and his lieutenant Daniel Zhang face the challenge of setting a new record after a fiery decade. With a cooling economy, saturated markets and competition from smaller platforms such as JD.com Inc. and Pinduoduo Inc., Alibaba is now looking for new growth drivers.
"Alibaba uses all of its platforms to make the singles party a day of meals and entertainment," said Jet Jing, president of Tmall, one of the company's main sites, during the Singles Festival . "We connect online shopping with physical outlets offline."
Singles Day is the brainchild of co-founder Ma and Zhang, who came up with the idea of turning the counter-cultural party into a real shopping center ten years ago. First popularized by students, November 11th appeared as an antidote to the sentimentality of Valentine's Day. It takes its name from the way the day is digitally written in 11/11, which looks like "bare branches", a local expression for unattached ones. Now, it has become a pretext to encourage people to shop, eat and eat entertainment shows. It has become so huge that packaging waste – Alibaba expects one billion packages to be shipped this year – and potential damage to the environment remains a recurring problem.
The general manager, who will succeed next year to the presidency of an outgoing president, must prove that he can perpetuate this legacy. His Hangzhou-based company also takes the opportunity to test the limits of its cloud computing, delivery and payment units.
Still, uncertainties remain this year, as commercial rates and deflation of badet values threaten to disrupt economic growth. Growth in Chinese online retail sales slowed to stand at 24 percent in the third quarter, down 12 points from the previous three months, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
More: Alibaba warns against highlighting the signs of a trade agreement between the United States and China
Ma did not say she wanted to make the Singles Festival a global phenomenon for three years, but that did not happen. International expansion will be a key part of Zhang's efforts to maintain records. Last year, the three main non-single markets of Chinese Singles Day were Russia, Hong Kong and the United States – in that order. Popular items purchased abroad included cell phones, wool coats and knit sweaters.
Simultaneously, Alibaba's efforts to break into the United States drag on. He gave up his commitment to create a million jobs in the country, lost his leading US supplier and abandoned his plans for the acquisition of MoneyGram by his subsidiary Ant Financial. US President Donald Trump announced in mid-October that he was planning to withdraw from a 192-nation treaty that provides for Chinese companies to benefit from discounts on shipping costs. for small parcels sent to US consumers, which makes it even more difficult for Chinese merchants to access the market.
Southeast Asia will provide the clearest indication of Alibaba's ability to globalize. Lazada, headquartered in Singapore, is now fully under its wing, the region remains one of the strengths of the company, in a context of slowing growth in China and unrest caused by escalating war commercial.
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