On Alibaba's Singles Day in Nov. 11 of last year, the company claimed that it had collected more than $9 billion online sales in China.
People around the world are familiar with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales day in America, but perhaps not that many knew about Singles Day, which was first introduced in 2009 by Daniel Zhang, Alibaba's new CEO.
Business Insider describes Singles Day as a celebration for people who are not involved in a romantic relationship. For Chinese retailers, it is the most important day of the year as well.
Zhang created this in order to boost the company's sales online. With the success of the scheme, it is now considered as the world's largest shopping day.
The e-commerce company revealed that last year, they took in more than 278 million orders within 24 hours after the Singles Day started. In addition, a source from Alibaba shared to the media that they usually get multi-million orders and delivers around 30 million parcels per day. But every Singles Day is different for they have to deliver a lot more. Last year's total deliveries reached 286 million.
But many think that these sales figures were just made up to make Alibaba look good.
"The numbers are less reliable than the average Chinese statistic," commented John Hempton, the manager of the Australian hedge fund Bronte Capital.
He further said through email:
"The numbers are silly in the sense that, if I said that a tree grew to 275 meters in my back yard, you would know I was making the numbers up. You may know for certain that there is a tree in my back yard - but my statement that it is 275 meters tall does not help you in any way determine how tall the tree is. The number is just made up."
Thus, with the suspicions, businessmen are keeping their eyes on this year's Singles Day event so as to verify Alibaba's claims of billion sales.
As stated by Fortune, the Singles Day 2015 will feature six million items from 30,000 brand names from 25 countries worldwide. Well-known labels that were mentioned include Nike, Apple, P&G, Unilever, Huggies, Burberry, Macy's, Estee Lauder, Zara, and many more.
On USA Today, Alibaba revealed that sales in the first thirty minutes already went beyond the $3 billion mark. The online shopping spree officially started at 12 mn in Beijing, and it was estimated that over 27 million buyers already placed orders within the first hour using their mobile phones.
"It's literally a 24 hour orgy of consumption, You've got literally got hundreds of millions of Chinese who are in their homes, on their offices and on their mobile phones, buying," Michael Zakkour, a principal at global consulting firm - Tompkins International.
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