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Online shoppers in China have shattered last year's record of $ 24 billion in sales on the country's annual buying frenzy Sunday, as the tradition marked its 10th year.
Cyber Monday in the U.S. for online purchases made on a single day. This year's tally breaks from the world's second-largest economy, which is struggling with a tariff with the U.S., a stock market slump and an overall growth slowing.
Known as Singles Day, the clamor of China's giant e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has turned into a digital music business.
A massive screen at Alibaba 's gala in Shanghai showed the surging sales in real time: At 2 minutes and 5 seconds after midnight Saturday, 10 trillion yuan ($ 1.43 trillion) in what has already been made on Alibaba' s platforms. By the 1 hour and 47 minute mark, that number had increased tenfold.
Just before 4 pm Sunday, the sales reached 168.2 trillion yuan ($ 24.2 trillion) – surpassing the total purchases of last year's singles day, according to Alibaba Group.
Singles Day began as a spoofed event by unattached Chinese university students in the 1990s. In Chinese, it's called "Double 11," after the numbers in the month and date. The improvised holiday was co-opted by e-retailers in 2009 and changed into China's version of Cyber Monday, as it is known today.
Nearly $ 6.6 billion in sales were made on Cyber Monday in 2017, up from 17 percent from the previous year, according to Adobe Analytics.
Ren Xiaotong, a 27-year-old accountant in Beijing, said she was confident that they were discounted.
But in the end, her skepticism did not stop her from partaking.
"Singles Day is different now – it has more tricks than before," Ren said. "You only save a few dozens of yuan at the end." "That being said, just to celebrate the festival."
The Twitter-like Weibo platform was blanketed with Singles Day-related posts on Sunday, from users proudly proclaiming that they had been shopping for an array of mundane purchases.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who will step down as chairman, attended the start of the gala in Shanghai and appeared in a video message, a popular online purchase.
Singles Day "is not a day of discounts, but rather a day of gratitude," Ma said in the video. "It's when retailers use the best products and best prices to show their gratitude to our consumers."
Chinese e-commerce platforms have come under fire for the past for low-quality peddling and counterfeit items. Hong Tao, an economics professor at Beijing Technology and Business University, said Singles Day said, "They are not doing it right now.
"People are swept up in the festivities," Hong said in a phone interview. "This burst of consumption, confined to just one day, can be exhausting for both buyers and sellers."
The opportunity also has big environmental implications.
While both Alibaba and competitor Greenpeace East Asia said many plastics marked "biodegradable" and used by Chinese e-retailers can break down only under high temperatures facilities that are limited in number across the country.
Greenpeace estimated that by 2020, "biodegradable" packaging could produce roughly 721 truckloads of trash in China every day.
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