How China’s Singles Day exploded and totally dwarfs Black Friday

 

 

Forget Black Friday. China’s Singles Day has financially usurped the West’s consumerist orgy with a retail festival all its own. Could its next step to be global retail domination?

 

 

This year’s Singles Day, an online discount frenzy focused on Chinese website Alibaba, set a new record with $30.8 billion in sales in just 24-hours, topping last year’s $25.3 billion and completely dwarfing Black Friday’s $8 billion or so.

 

 

Such consumer festivals, as they’ve been dubbed, have different origins. Black Friday has long been the name for the day after Thanksgiving in the US, when retailers slash prices ahead of Christmas shopping. The origin of the name is unclear, says Nelson Blackley, retail research associate at Nottingham Trent University, with some saying it’s so-called because of heavy traffic conditions the day after Thanksgiving or marking when retailers make a profit and so shift from red into the black. Either way, online retailers escalated the consumer frenzy, extending it to so-called “Cyber Monday”. In 2010, both sales came to the UK via Amazon, with rivals following its lead in subsequent years.

 

 

In China, Singles Day had wildly different origins, though the end result is a similar shopping frenzy. It started, notes Blackley, as a celebration for single people back in the 1990s, with uncoupled students treating themselves to a present. It’s also known as “bare sticks holiday” or “double eleven”, as it falls on the date 11/11, as well as “Bachelors’ Day”, as most of those singletons are men, partially down to China’s gender imbalance following the one-child policy, he notes.

Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, spotted the opportunity and adopted Singles Day in 2009, shifting it from a day for single people to gift themselves to a day for everyone to shop, regardless of relationship status, Blackley notes. The company eventually claimed the phrase as a trademark. “The original ‘anti-Valentine/gifts for themselves’ motivation, whilst still important, has expanded into a more general purchasing phenomenon, with products also being bought for friends and family,” Blackley says.

 

About Black Friday 

The original Black Friday historically focused on electrical and household products, with Prime Day centred on tech products. While plenty of tech devices are sold on Singles Day, with Apple pipping Huawei and Xiaomi to be the top-selling mobile phone brand, the Chinese consumer festival has a wider range of products, from clothing to vitamins.

 

 

Discount vitamins may not sound particularly sexy, but Singles Day is genuinely seen as a celebration. Black Friday attracts criticisms of hyper-consumerism — the makers of Cards Against Humanity famously troll the event, selling boxes of crap one year — as well as accusations that retailers are over-hyping discounts, but Singles Day remains unironically popular in China.

 

 

“At the gala counting down to the opening of the sale before midnight on November 11, top celebrities put on an extravaganza for a cheering audience,” says Blackley. This year saw Mariah Carey and Miranda Kerr attending; the Beckhams have previously shown up. “It’s almost like the Academy Awards, a New Year’s Celebration, and the Superbowl all in one.” That’s propped up by tech, with Alibaba last year releasing an AR mobile game letting shoppers track a cat cartoon to win coupons.

 

Revenue Growth of Alibaba

For Alibaba, GMV growth is slowing for Singles’ Day, increasing by 27 per cent from 2017 to 2018, versus 39 per cent the year before — of course, that’s still a major increase year on year. “I think you have to understand Alibaba and what Alibaba’s doing in the context of the long-term secular trend that’s developing in China, which is the rise of the Chinese middle class,” said Alibaba executive vice chairman Joe Tsai in a statement on its own press site. “That trend is not going to stop, trade war or no trade war.”

 

 

If anything, it could spread — even to the UK. Black Friday is struggling to nab a place in the British psyche, with Retail Assist research suggesting fewer shoppers plan to take part this year than last, and Asda announcing in 2015 it will recuse itself from the sale day.

 

 

However, Asos, TopShop, Marks and Spencer, and Waitrose all had offers on Alibaba for Singles’ Day. “Unlike say Black Friday in the UK, where the numbers of retailers participating is declining, the number of retailers getting involved in Singles Day is exploding – as the huge sales benefits of participation are understood,” says Blackley. “There are also longer term benefits to non-Chinese brands in participating as it givens them huge brand awareness in that market too.”

 

 

Retailers are keen on Singles Day — but what about British shoppers? The awkward date of November 11 clashing with Remembrance Day means the discount blowout isn’t likely to be scheduled for the same date, but Blackley believes the huge success of Singles Day means it’ll be celebrated beyond China’s borders.

 

Conclusion

“It’s already spread into markets such as Thailand and Singapore,” he says. “The challenge is that the calendar for consumer discount and promotional events is now quite crowded — Valentines Day, Easter, Back to School, Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, Post-Christmas, January sales — so establishing another event that gets awareness, support of retailers, and most importantly that can actually deliver incremental sales and profit for the businesses involved is increasingly difficult.” Perhaps we simply don’t need another shopping orgy, but Singles Day may end up penciled into our calendars yet.