Author: Raymond Zhong / Source: New York Times
SHANGHAI — After 24 hours of frenzied buying and selling, and weeks of advertising and promotions before it, the Alibaba Group announced that its sales hit another titanic high on Singles Day, the Nov. 11 shopping festival that the Chinese e-commerce behemoth cooked up a decade ago.
This time, as China’s vast economy slows, the party was held with icebergs in sight from the deck.
China’s biggest online shopping company kicked off the country’s biggest shopping day with its usual ostentation. Its Saturday night gala event in Shanghai featured the singer Mariah Carey, the retired basketball star Allen Iverson and Miranda Kerr, the Australian supermodel. A Chinese girl group performed a song called “Wanna Buy Wanna Buy” as backup dancers pushed shopping carts bearing the logo of Aldi, the German discount grocer.
At the stroke of midnight on Monday, Alibaba said it had racked up $30.8 billion in sales the day before, as measured by its own metric, gross merchandise value. That handily topped last year’s big number, $25.3 billion.
But all around China, gloom and uncertainty are the word.
Economic growth is slowing, and the country’s hundreds of millions of middle-class shoppers seem to be holding on more tightly to their pocketbooks. Tech companies are antsy about the government’s more interventionist attitude toward big business. The tariff fight with the United States is casting a pall not simply over trade, but over China’s future writ large. This month, Alibaba cut its sales forecast for the year ending in March by around 5 percent, citing the wobbly economy and the trade war.
Meanwhile, some young Chinese shoppers seem less enthused this year about celebrating manic consumerism.
Yang Sun, a 26-year-old from the northern city of Xi’an, said that the Singles Day discounts were no longer good enough to persuade her to wait all year to buy the things she wanted. Wang Xin, 24, an engineer in Shanghai, said he had rediscovered the joys of shopping offline.
“Singles Day just doesn’t hold that much appeal for me,” Mr. Wang said.
Asked about the current mood among Chinese consumers, Joseph C. Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman, told reporters on Sunday that Alibaba should be understood in the context of the epochal rise of China’s middle class.
“That trend is not going to stop, trade war or no trade war,” he said. “Any kind of short-term economic effects, we believe, will be cyclical.”
Alibaba is not like Amazon in that it is not a retailer. It merely provides the digital shelves and aisles for other merchants to sell their goods. But in its relentless ambition, Alibaba may be Amazon’s only global equal. Both companies want to fulfill their customers’ every desire and need.
Already, people order dinner on Alibaba’s takeout app, buy groceries from Alibaba’s supermarkets, watch movies produced by Alibaba, navigate with Alibaba’s smartphone maps and rent computing power from Alibaba’s servers. And the company still wants to do more. It recently opened an unmanned hotel. It is making its own computer chips. It wants to promote African economic development and end world hunger.
The business case for all this empire-building, Alibaba says, is that the company’s lakes of commercial data…
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