Singles Day was once the most celebrated celebration of consumerism. It was a 24-hour online retail event that culminated in a glittering gala and a stupendous amount of riches for brands, celebrities and Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant.
Chinese shoppers will still be buying lots of stuff on Singles Day, an annually celebrated Nov. 11 tradition. But this year’s bash is looking a little more abashed.
The shopping holiday, which Alibaba invented over a decade ago, is evolving for a chastened new era for China’s internet industry, one that emphasizes fairness and responsibility and publicly spurns growth-at-all-costs excess. Alibaba’s past Singles Days provided an opportunity for it to show off its latest innovations in getting people spend less. The big themes this year: green logistics, eco-friendly products and consuming “with care.”
Alibaba’s Tmall app is giving out “green vouchers” for discounts on energy-efficient and low-impact goods. The company’s logistics unit is offering to recycle packaging waste at 60,000 pickup stations across China. Alibaba says it will donate one yuan, or around 16 cents, to charity every time someone interacts during the event with a social media post about the company’s charitable ventures.
“We must leverage the power of 11.11 to encourage sustainable development and promote inclusiveness to consumers, merchants and partners across our ecosystem,” Alibaba’s chief marketing officer, Chris Tung, declared last month.
One mainstay of Singles Day has been Alibaba’s announcement of its blowout final sales figure, which invariably tops the previous year’s blowout number by a prodigious margin. When asked whether Alibaba would continue the tradition this year, Mr. Tung demurred, saying only that the company’s focus had shifted from pure sales growth to “sustainable growth.”
A spokeswoman for Alibaba declined to confirm this week that the company would announce sales figures after the event.
(Alibaba already began quietly redefining the meaning of its marquee Singles Day Number: Last year, it revealed that the total value of all orders during the 24 hours of November 11 and the 10 days before it. Alibaba uses gross merchandise volume as a metric. There is no standard definition. The company can choose the result it reports.
Xi Jinping is the new leader of China’s Big Tech. As Mr. Xi prepares to seek a precedent-breaking third term as the country’s paramount leader, his government has put up new regulatory guardrails around Alibaba and other internet heavyweights, ending an exuberant period of unbridled boom times for the industry.
This spring, China’s antitrust authority fined Alibaba $2.8 billion for anticompetitive practices, the largest such fine in the agency’s history. Financial regulators have ordered Alibaba’s internet-finance sister company, Ant, to restructure its business and submit to tougher oversight.
Alibaba’s co-founder Jack Ma was once a regular sight at the Singles Day evening gala, performing card tricks with Scarlett Johansson and posing onstage with Daniel Craig. He has mostly vanished from public view this year, prompting nervous speculation about Ma’s safety.
The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, which Alibaba owns, published last month unnamed sources claiming that Mr. Ma was visiting research centers in the Netherlands. This was a sign that he had not been barred from leaving China by authorities, as they often do to people involved in investigations or court proceedings.
That was reason enough for Alibaba’s shareholders to cheer, after a year in which the company’s stock price had dropped by about half.
Beijing has not slowed down in its efforts make internet companies behave less abrasive. Regulators have told companies to stop blocking links to one another’s services. They have directed e-commerce websites not to bombard users in advance of Singles Day with marketing messages.
Another new watchword for Chinese capitalists is “common prosperity,” or a more equitable distribution of wealth. Shortly after Mr. Xi endorsed the theme in August, Alibaba committed $15.5 billion to “common prosperity” goals. A few weeks later, the company’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, added “common prosperity” to Alibaba’s “core corporate responsibilities.”
Alibaba claims that it is helping small businesses in China by providing more support for them.
Wei Wei, age 35, is a cofounder of Beats Per Minute 120. It is a brand of colorfully-patterned socks. Singles Day has never been a guaranteed boon for small sellers like him. He stated that Alibaba tends not to direct shoppers to big merchants via its apps, as they can deliver the sales growth Alibaba loves to boast about.
Mr. Wei stated that Alibaba recently reduced merchant fees and offered more guidance to small sellers, including himself. He said that more customers would be a big help. With Alibaba facing stiffer competition with platforms like Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), he knows that attracting those eyeballs can be more expensive.
However, Mr. Wei says he is happy to be receiving any support from Alibaba. Other small merchants, ones with dimmer business prospects, “they’re not being included,” he said.
Alibaba declined to comment.
Source: NY Times
