Making a billion in a minute? Coming from Alibaba Group, perhaps it isn’t too big of a shocker. Its annual 11.11 Global Shopping Festival again broke records when it kicked off at the stroke of midnight on 11 November 2019. In the first minute and eight seconds, GMV made through Alipay hit USD1 billion. And within the first hour, this number ballooned to a whopping USD12 billion.
At 10AM, the GMV for 2019 already exceeded that of 2017’s. By around 4PM, total GMV exceeded USD30 billion.
The final number at the stroke of midnight officially stands at USD38.4 billion (RMB268.4 billion), up 26 percent year-on-year.
In addition to a new record GMV, the total number of delivery orders also reached a new high: 1.292 billion, up 5 percent from 812 million last year. There were 299 brands to reach RMB100 million in GMV, including Apple, Nike, Estee Lauder and Giorgio Armani. The top 10 countries selling to China through Alibaba’s cross-border platforms were Japan, the US, Korea, Australia, Germany, France, the UK, New Zealand, Italy and Canada.
Leading up to the shopping event, Youku, Alibaba’s video streaming platform, hosted the fifth annual countdown gala, headlined by global superstar Taylor Swift and other international and local celebrities.
The gala was hosted at Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai and was broadcast live across 30 platforms and TV channels.
Commenting at the company’s Hangzhou headquarters, Alibaba Chief Technology Officer Jeff Zhang described 11.11 as “an airplane flying at turbo speed”, only this year it has a brand new engine; having moved its core systems onto the cloud, significantly boosting performance.
The company’s Apsara operating system powers tens of thousands of servers. And this year, Alibaba saw major breakthroughs in database technology as well as artificial-intelligence chip development, such as “Hangugang 800”—its first AI inference chip.
For more highlights from Alibaba Group’s epic 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, visit Alizila.
