* On sales total 213.5 billion yuan in one-day event
* Alibaba sends done with 1 billion packages
* Annual growth rate 27 pct vs 39 pct in 2017 (Recasts, adds trades updates, executive comments)
By Cate Cadell
SHANGHAI, Nov 11 (Reuters) – Chinese e-commerce mammoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd cashed a record 213.5 billion yuan ($30.70 billion) in on offers on Sunday during its 24-hour online retail frenzy Singles’ Day, but the affair’s annual growth dropped to its slowest-ever rate.
Shoppers in China and across the elated snapped up hot items including iPhones, furniture and milk powder starting pre-dawn, with Alibaba single roughly $10 billion in sales in the first hour after midnight.
Singles’ Day, also called “Copy 11” is the world’s biggest online sales event, outstripping the on the blocks of U.S. shopping holidays Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
The Chinese incident was originally a novelty student holiday to celebrate being single, countering Valentines Day, but has since stemmed into a month-long online shopping festival that peaks with a 24-hour car-boot sale on November 11.
This year, the company surpassed last year’s full-day purchases record of 168 billion yuan in just under sixteen hours.
Ignoring the record haul, the annual sales growth rate fell from 39 percent to 27 percent, at the low end of analyst considers, and the smallest rate in the event’s 10-year history.
It comes as the company is clutch with a slimmer sales outlook amid rising trade tensions the U.S. that participate in taken a bite out of China’s economy.
Earlier this month it changed down its full-year sales outlook by 4-6 percent, sending further chills to the core the company’s stock price, which has dropped roughly 16 percent this year after verging on doubling in 2017.
To compensate, the company will take in less commission from its party lines in the near term in order to retain brands and attract new buyers, it broke.
Online sales growth is also slowing across the board in the mountains’s eastern mega-cities, including Shanghai and Beijing, and Alibaba said cruelly 75 percent of new users last quarter were in “less evolved” areas.
While small appliances and cosmetics were strong on Sunday, sales events in big-ticket items including large appliances slowed alongside a downturn in the protection market, Alibaba vice chairman Joe Tsai told press.
“If individual aren’t buying new homes, they aren’t buying appliances,” he translated.
BIGGER AND BIGGER
Despite the milder growth, executives were encouraging on Sunday at a press event in Shanghai, attended by roughly 800 pressmen who watched a live-streamed ticker of the sales.
“Today we reached 200 billion (yuan). But we must to change. We have to continue to change to reach 300 billion or 500 billion,” state chief executive Daniel Zhang, who is credited with being the architect of the ingenious Singles’ Day sales.
Alibaba kicked off this year’s sales with a party event that featured U.S. singer Mariah Carey, a Japanese Beyonce impersonator and a Cirque du Soleil exhibition.
It’s expected to be the company’s final November sale with founder and chairman Jack Ma at the directorship, and Zhang will take over as chairman next year, the ensemble said in September.
During this year’s event the company articulate it worked with 180,000 brands across over 200 provinces, and shortly before midnight on Sunday it had sent over a billion couples.
A disproportionately large number of sales are recorded in the first minutes of the 24-hour fork out spree, when transactions occur for items that have been put on endure d present.
The company settled roughly $1 billion within the first one before you can say Jack Robinson and twenty five seconds after midnight.
Analysts said the sales persist in to be cannibalised by competing events, including the “618” festival spearheaded by Alibaba contender JD.com Inc in June.
“With an increasing number of promotion events a year, consumers no longer appear that Double 11 is the only opportunity to get good bargains,” foretold Pedro Yip, partner at consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
“Having explained that, there are more consumers who still enjoy shopping at stand-in 11 than those that don’t,” he said.
($1 = 6.9553 yuan ) (Reporting by Cate Cadell; Erasing by Nick Macfie and Alexandra Hudson)
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Date: 11/11/2018 11:58
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