Alibaba’s sales are an indicator of the strength of consumer spending in China.
Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
Alibaba
and
JD.com
reported rising sales over Singles Day, but the shopping festival still wasn’t an inspiring victory for the world’s second-largest economy.
China’s version of Black Friday, Singles Day—Nov. 11—is the world’s largest shopping spree and the culmination of what is typically a two-week period of sales offered by e-commerce companies like Alibaba (ticker: BABA), JD.com (JD), and
Pinduoduo
(PDD). The results both play a key role in fueling fourth-quarter revenue growth and are a strong barometer of consumer sentiment in China.
This year’s results, which come as a slowdown in China’s economy has been a periodic pressure on global markets for months, weren’t a slam dunk. Alibaba and JD.com, which chose not to disclose the value of sales over Singles Day for the first time in 2022, again opted not to release full results.
Alibaba said only that sales growth was positive, leaving it unclear whether revenue inched to a record. The company’s Singles Day sales hit a peak in 2021, with the group saying in 2022 that sales were comparable to the year prior. JD.com, for its part, said that revenue hit a record in 2023. Growth was likely muted at the companies, which saw double-digit revenue growth before Covid-19 and China’s slow economic recovery.
Independent analyses of Singles Day confirm the likelihood of stagnant sales growth and paint a picture of a weaker Chinese consumer.
From the evening of Oct. 11 to the end of Nov. 11, gross merchandise value, a measure of a platform’s sales volume, grew less than 2.1% from a year earlier, down from 2.9% in 2022, according to Chinese data provider Syntun. More than 75% of shoppers had planned to spend the same amount or less than in 2022, according to a survey conducted by consulting group Bain.
Shares in Alibaba gained 0.2% in premarket trading on Monday. JD.com stock advanced 0.7%, while shares of
Pinduoduo
were up 1.7%.
Write to Jack Denton at [email protected]
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