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Singles' Day 2017 clears 25.4 billion USD in 24 hours

Kenny Ong TimeOutShanghai 2019-04-12



As expected, the final sales figures for Singles’ Day 2017 are a gallop ahead of the day’s sales figures in 2016. This year’s sale generated 25.4 billion USD (162.2 billion RMB), which is a 39.5 percent jump from 2016’s final sales.



While jaded observers might take this moment to overstate their complete lack of surprise, the rest of us can take a moment to just appreciate the grand scale of the thing. Singles' Day is the world's biggest day for online sales and sales in general. It’s like staring into the Grand Canyon, if the Grand Canyon was formed by erosion from the tears of Singles’ Day delivery workers.


Two minutes after the Singles’ Day sales went live at midnight, regular and pre-order sales surpassed one billion USD. Within the next hour, sales surpassed 10 billion USD. By the end of the day, Singles’ Day 2017 was undoubtedly the biggest day for shopping in the world, surpassing the popularity of western sales days Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.



While images of sales-crazed consumers stampeding through barely opened store gates have become synonymous with Black Friday, Singles’ Day is more about parcel logistics. With tsunamis of parcels flooding warehouses and a handful of workers sorting through them all along a single conveyer belt, otherwise mundane shipping centres become stock photography for Singles’ Day news reports.



The State Post Bureau (SPB) reports that China’s courier and postal services handled at least 331 million parcels on this year’s Singles’ Day, which is 31.5 per cent more than last year’s numbers. That’s only for the orders that needed same-day shipping, out of a total 812 million orders for the day. The SPB also estimates that daily shipping volume will be three times the normal amount for the rest of the Singles’ Day sales period.


‘On Singles Day, shopping is a sport, it's entertainment,’ said Alibaba co-founder and vice chairman Joseph Tsai. In his statement, Tsai goes on to signal Singles’ Day as a metric for the growing wealth and size of China’s middle class. Environmentalists suggest that Singles’ Day is also a metric for unsustainable consumption, with Greenpeace calling it a ‘catastrophe for the environment.’ Whatever way you look at it, it’s undeniable that Singles’ Day is a force of nature.

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