Alibaba brings in $9.3B for a "Single's Day" record

It took U.S. consumers a whole week to spend only $5.3 billion during the 2013 holidays

For the Chinese, November 11th is what is known as "Single's Day." It is supposed to serve as almost an anti-Valentine's Day, in which bachelors and bachelorettes get to, you know, celebrate being single. And it’s on 11/11. Because they are all single numbers. Pretty clever, eh? 

The day, which has been around in some capacity since the 90s, having supposedly been invented by a bunch of college kids, but has now been successfully commercialized (who says that China is so different from America?) It was popularized by Alibaba in 2009, then copyrighted in 2012, and has now become a big shopping holiday in the country, growing bigger and bigger each year, becoming the world's largest single sales day.

It's now even become bigger than America's Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In 2013, Alibaba broke a single day record with a total of $5.78 billion spent on Single's Day, shipping 150 million packages. This year, that number was absolutely destroyed, with consumers spending a whopping $9.3 billion (RMB 57.1 billion), it was announced via Twitter on Tuesday.

[23:59:59] Final 11.11 Shopping Festival GMV figures exceed RMB 57.1 billion (USD $9.3 billion); 42.6% from mobile pic.twitter.com/mHxJCVeYN6

— Alizila.com (@Alizila) November 11, 2014

There were a total of 278.5 million packages shipped, with over $4 billion  (RMB 24.3 billion), or 42% of the amount spent, coming from mobile. At its peak, 2.85 million transactions were being processed per minute by Alipay during the day.

To put it in perspective, the total amount spent on Cyber Monday last year was $1.74 billion. All told, consumers spent a grand total of $5.3 billion online between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday. Singles Day 2014 surpassed that amount by a total of 77%.

More than 27,000 brands and merchants participated in the event, including Costco, Muji, Desigual, ASOS, and The North Face, with buyers from 217 countries and regions participating in this year’s Single's Day sales.

“On behalf of our entire ecosystem — from millions of buyers and merchants both here and abroad — we are very happy with the results of this year’s 11.11 shopping festival,” Jonathan Lu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said in a statement.

“We are particularly encouraged by the growing trend of consumers embracing mobile shopping on a global stage. Alibaba is humbled to play a role in making it easy for people to do business anywhere."

The amount of money spent on Single's Day is just another showing of Alibaba's enormous  strength in China. In September, the IPO priced at $68, raising $21.8 billion. That made it the biggest U.S. IPO in history and company founder Jack Ma the richest man in China. 

In its most recent quarter, the company reported revenue that grew 54% year to year, to $2.74 billion. 

(Image source: quickmeme.com)