Alibaba’s Singles Day chalked up $1bn of sales in less than five minutes and hitting a record Rmb120.7bn ($17.79bn) in sales by midnight, a 32% rise year-on-year. Jack Ma declared it would continue for another 92 years, according to the Financial Times. He also demoted the controversial sales metric of gross merchandise volume (GMV). Alibaba, the ecommerce giant which transformed the date – 11.11 – into the biggest shopping day in the world, has come under regulatory scrutiny in the US for its GMV measure, which is real time and unaudited. Ma, founder and chairman, said GMV would “no longer be the most important indication of our performance,” since Alibaba had outgrown the measure and “because it could even be misleading to the outside world.”
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