Singles Day is the Chinese version of Black Friday with the one exception their sales are so much bigger. Alibaba and JD are the two main sales platforms and the US Black Friday sales don't come close. Last year the US revenue was only just over $11 billion compared to China's $254 billion.
Singles Day in China is the 11th November and is an online shopping event created by Alibaba back in 2009. The history behind singles day was more of an anti valentines day with the 11/11 being selected as the four sticks represent single people standing together back in 1993 celebrated by Nanjing University students. A useless fact that will never be forgotten and will clutter the brain so I apologies for sharing this with you. Who knows it may be of use in some trivia question and you will be the only one who can answer this.
Alibaba the Chinese based global ecommerce platform used this as an excuse to have a 24 hour shopping day and was an instant hit. Back in 2009 the 24 hour shopping revenue was $7.8 million and caught on with the shoppers in 2010 when revenue hit $135 million. This was nothing compared to the growth of what was to come 2011 $750 million, 2012 $3.0 billion, 2013 $5.8 billion, 2013 $9.3 billion up to 2019 achieving $38.4 billion, but was no longer nearly doubling each year. Not happy with a 25% growth between 2017 and 2019 they changed the Singles Day online sales to 11 days from November 1st - 11th. The extended selling period saw revenue increase from $74.1 billion up to $254 billion in 2025.
Since the Singles Day inception in 2009 sales have been climbing like some hyped worthless meme coin except this year sales were only $154 billion. This is a $100 billion drop in revenue which is rather large. The wheels have not come off and is more in my mind that the market is saturated and you cannot sell everyone a new tv each year and the demand is no longer matching the supply. This was bound to happen and has taken a good 15-20 years to reach this point.
According to reports the sales discounts were not as good as the years before which would make logical sense. Shoppers know their prices and will wait for the "special" deals. The reality is consumption is down as wages are generally down so the big name brands are not in big demand.
China experienced such rapid growth the local markets are flooded with too many choices for the same items. Government subsidies on EV cars has been removed and sales are down almost 30% this year. Exports on EV's are up over 70% so the local manufacturers are having to look at other countries to meet their sales targets. The international fashion houses have felt the pinch with sales not like they normally are and the honeymoon demand period seems to have ended.
AI selling agents were introduced this year with AI tokens being sold that can be redeemed with AI selling agents promoting specific items. The Chinese do not miss a selling opportunity and what happens there will be here within the next two years. Alibaba's Qwen is the agent who recommends items to shoppers who are struggling to select a particular brand. One live stream sold 2 trillion AI tokens within 30 minutes and the streamer was nicknamed the "lipstick king" as shoppers exchanged AI tokens for promoted lipstick.
The Chinese economy locally is subdued due to a number of factors with the main one being the property sector experiencing negative demands and property prices have fallen sharply by around 20%. Who can forget Evergrande whose filing for bankruptcy in 2020 triggered all of this with liabilities of over $300 billion. The bankruptcy case has been going on for many years and in August this year the founder of Evergrande was sentenced to life imprisonment and directors and family members who were linked 18 year sentences. The Chinese do not play with anything to do with financial irregularities like corruption being the death penalty.
I think what this shows us and what many of us thought all along and that China was in a type of bubble. The country was growing so fast it could not realistically carry on at such a pace locally. That catching up time has happened internally and the growth has to happen externally through exports so I guess we are all going to be flooded with Chinese junk. We see it with Temu and Shien and they have so many other online platforms. Still it is interesting seeing what is happening in China because more often than not it will impact other countries in some form or another.
This year in South Africa we have seen retailers already running their Black Friday campaigns so it is no longer a one day event. The idea around Black Friday originally was to empty the retailers warehouses in order to make space for new arriving stock. Shipping times have been reduced and retailers have changed their ordering habits so it is more of an excuse to create hype and make money creating a bumper six week festive shopping period. I expect retailers around the world will see the revenue numbers down this year as most economies are struggling with household budgets being tight and not much disposable income.
