China’s leading e-commerce platforms reported strong sales for the first checkout window of this year’s Singles’ Day shopping festival, despite a cooling economy and weakening consumer sentiment, reports the South China Morning Post.
Alibaba Group Holding said 102 brands on its retail network, which includes its flagship sites Taobao and Tmall, surpassed RMB 100 million ($13.8 million) in gross merchandise value within an hour after the first round of sales opened for payments on Monday.
Those brands include homegrown white goods maker Haier Group, Midea Group and subsidiary Little Swan, and TCL Technology, all of which crossed the RMB 100 million mark within the first second, Alibaba said. Haier went on to surpass the RMB 1 billion mark in five minutes, while its live-streaming channel on Tmall crossed RMB 100 billion in the first 20 minutes, making it the first among its peers to reach that milestone.