Getting Paid in the World’s Biggest Shopping Event
Singles’ Day is underway in China, the shopping equivalent to Black Friday, and you won’t believe some of the numbers retailers are posting. Alibaba investors made about five bucks from sales during the opening hour alone!
Most look at the 11th November date and think nothing, a few smirk at all the ones, but only Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang imagines the opportunity for a multi-billion dollar ecommerce extravaganza. You already know the annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday dash-for-trash events, right? Well, it turns out that in China, ‘Singles’ Day’ works too.
It’s a 24-hour shopping purge in which single Chinese consumers trample each other Hunger Games-style to fill our corporate pockets and raise our Chinese holdings. Mwah-hah-hah!
Last year for Alibaba, the day was worth $30 billion in revenue. That’s cute! We’re only a few primitive hours into this year’s shopping-fest, and that number is already in the rearview mirror! Taylor Swift set the wheels in motion with a live performance in Shanghai, symbolic of over 200,000 Western brands getting in on this through Alibaba, JD.com, or their own channels!
Speaking of Alibaba, this is not an opportunity to squander. A crunch Hong Kong IPO looms so for now, it’s reinvesting everything back into the business, with plans to pay a dividend relegated. Investors will, therefore, be looking for short-term days of wonderment for BABA stock to pop. Could this be one of them?