Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Double 11 Record Sales Signal Strength of Chinese Consumption

Economics / China Economy Nov 12, 2019 - 07:07 PM GMT

By: Dan_Steinbock

Economics On Monday, Alibaba’s Single’s Day broke all records. Chinese consumption and ecommerce signal not just continued resilience but evident strength.

By 5 pm on Monday Alibaba Group had already broken last year’s record of $31 billion. And at midnight, the new record soared to $38.3 billion – 25 percent higher than last year.



Despite the continuing - and misleading - international headlines about China’s “slowing economy” and “consumption collapse,” Alibaba’s 11th Single’s Day gala alone generated more revenues than US Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

Alibaba’s Singles’ Day shopping festival is not just the world’s largest of its kind. It is a vital barometer of Chinese consumption amid the US tariff wars.

Double 11 Is Regionalizing and Internationalizing

According to Alibaba, more than 200,000 brands participated in the 11th Singles D - ay promotion – or the “Double 11” as it is popularly known - with 1 million new products being offered and over 500 million users forecast to spend; that’s 100 million more than last year.

This year Alibaba deployed its highly popular online shopping platforms, Tmall and Taobao, but also business-to-business ecommerce platforms, like AliExpress, and Lazada, the shopping site favored in Southeast Asia. As business began, the top regions in mainland in terms of transactions were Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Shandong. However, Alibaba is also tapping regional, even international consumers.

In the early hours, the most active overseas buyers included Hong Kong, the US, Australia and Japan. Even before the festival on Monday, some 64 brands, such as Apple, Lancome, Dyson and L’Oreal, garnered millions of dollars in Alibaba pre-orders, with Estée Lauder garnering a record $143 million.

Double 11 is now a big win-win opportunity not just for China but for international exporters from advanced and developing countries alike.

Ecom Success Reflects Chinese Cost-Efficiency, Innovation

In China, ecommerce explosion began in the mid-2010s. But as business has mobilized in the past half a decade, transactions occur smoothly with smartphones and volumes are soaring.

Today Chinese consumers use smartphones to browse top online shopping sites, such as Alibaba’s Taobao.com, and submit orders. It is the net effect of 15-20 years of innovation by Chinese smartphones, mobile operators and ecommerce giants.

In the early 2000s, NTT DoCoMo probably had the best mobile services, but since the Japanese operator failed to internationalize, it lost its edge. The Finnish Nokia developed popular 2G, even 3G services, but moved too slowly into smartphones.

That’s how Apple’s iPhone captured the early lead in smartphones. Yet, it could not respond to a new generation of Chinese smartphones by Huawei and its peers - Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo – which now dominate 75 percent of the global smartphone market and are more cost-efficient and more innovative. Nor could the US companies, despite their early lead in the fixed-line Internet, match the co-innovation of Chinese operators and ecommerce giants, such as Alibaba.

That’s why Chinese pioneers are already launching 5G services, while pioneering 6G platforms. And that’s also why the White House keeps resorting to anti-competitive means seeking to undermine Huawei’s legitimate success.

Explosion of Chinese online consumption

Through the 16 months of US tariffs, international headlines have predicted doom and gloom in China. And yet, Chinese industrial production picked up in September, despite reduced export growth. Third-quarter data reflected resilience of consumption. And while US trade wars have made consumers cost-conscious, retail sales climbed to 7.8 percent, thanks to slate of policy supports.

Alibaba’s success and the new Double 11 record mimic the broader consumption trends in China. The same goes for urbanization. As the growth momentum in the mainland has been shifting from the coastal first-tier cities to lower-tiered cities, gains in purchasing power in small-and-medium size cities drove Double 11 sales.

When Alibaba’s ecommerce gala began on Monday, the China International Import Expo (CIIE) had just ended in Shanghai. In that bonanza, the value of intended deals exceeded $71 billion, up 23 percent from the first expo in 2018 – mimicking Alibaba’s sales triumph.

The Double 11 and Shanghai CIIE records and the consumption data in the past few quarters offer abundant evidence that Chinese consumption is far more resilient and stronger than ideological eadlines in the West presume.

Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see http://www.differencegroup.net/  

© 2019 Copyright Dan Steinbock - All Rights Reserved

Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

Dan Steinbock Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in