Alibaba and JD.com keep Singles Day sales under wraps for first time

Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com have opted to not release any sales numbers for their annual Singles Day, possibly hinting that macroeconomic headwinds could be hitting the region and its businesses.

While Alibaba said the results had delivered in line with last year’s GMV performance despite the macro challenges, JD.com said this year saw a “record-breaking” revenue over the 11-day promotional period, which kicked off on October 31 and ran until November 11.

The latter further noted that transaction volumes of top fashion brands from LVMH Group, including Bvlgari, Celine, Fendi and Loewe, had increased 18 times.

According to a statement by the group’s president of Greater China, Andrew Wu, LVMH had partnered with JD.com for 19 brands across an array of categories, with 10 additional brands debuted as part of this year’s collaboration.

The platform also saw a 200 percent increase in transaction volume for 87 international beauty brands, while the 500 international brands on JD Worldwide had a 100 percent rise.

Meanwhile, Alibaba boasted a range of over 290,000 brands across 7,000 product categories for this year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, with it reporting that within the first four hours of the second check-out window, more than 130 brands surpassed RMB 100 million in member-generated GMV.

Additionally, over 5,600 brands saw their member-generated GMV more than double compared to the same period last year.

Around 1,000 overseas brands on its Tmall Global platform had further achieved year-on-year growth of more than 100 percent, with categories like sports & outdoors and jewellery particularly enjoying strong growth momentum.

For 2022, Alibaba further launched livestreaming sessions via Taobao, hosted by influencers and merchants, for which more than 300 million consumers had tuned in to view.