Biggest Shopping Day in the World
I was really looking forward to the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. It was not because I had lots to buy, but that I was curious what Alibaba’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) for 2018 would be. At the stroke of midnight, when the festival ended, the GMV was a staggering US$30.8 billion.
In terms of GDP, US$30.8 billion would have made Alibaba the 95th largest economy in the world. This figure was achieved in a mere 24 hours. And I didn’t even have to wait 24 hours to grasp the might of Chinese consumers. By the 120th second, the GMV had already crossed US$1 billion. This was truly phenomenal.
When my excitement subsided and I started reading the reports on the 11.11 festival, I came to realise that Alibaba’s achievement was not the GMV, but the technologies and the infrastructure it put in place. The B2C platform, the cloud services and the e-logistic network all worked perfectly to support the biggest shopping day in the world.
The pace at which the Chinese are adopting and reinventing technology has left me amazed and expectant of what is to come.
Angeline Tong is an architect of narratives and Chief Curator at HOL, an experience strategy and curation consultancy. Angeline has a Master of Education (Human Development & Psychology) from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies from Harvard University. She currently resides in Singapore.
To contact Angeline, email atong@hol.sg
