Singles Day goes global

Alibaba's sales reaches 91.2 billion yuan. [Photo by Zhou Mo]

Global shoppers have welcomed Alibaba's Singles Day online shopping festival with higher enthusiasm this year, only taking a little more than 15 hours since the event started on Friday to beat the total gross merchandise volume of 91.2 billion yuan generated last year.

Within 15 hours, more than 467 million packages had been generated by shoppers, exceeding the total last year.

Courier companies have been working around the clock to make sure shoppers get their products at the earliest time. Within 28 minutes after the shopping festival kicked off, the first customer from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, got the cross-border packages bought on TMall International.

Launched by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba in 2009, the global event, which is the largest around the world, has become a shopping spree not only for Chinese consumers, but also for people from all over the world.

A total of 210 countries and regions have participated in the event this year.

Alibaba Group President Michael Evans said the consumption of a growing customer base around the world is one of the fundamental preconditions for the company's globalization.

"The most important consumers of the future are five to seven billion people that live in this part of the world who are emerging into the middle class, who are looking more and more like Chinese consumers today, in Southeast Asia, India, in Russia, Brazil, in addition to consumers that live in Europe and the US," he said.

What Alibaba does is to provide a platform to connect merchants and consumers and also helps the merchants to explain their goods to consumers in markets they may not understand at all, he said.