China is halfway through its annual day of online discounts - Singles Day - and it has already beaten its sales total for last year, making today the biggest-ever day of online sales.
Alibaba, China's answer to Amazon, has reported that it comfortably surpassed last year's sale total of $9.3bn by shortly after midday local time.
The first $1bn in sales was recorded within eight minutes of midnight.
The e-commerce site forecast yesterday it would use 1.7m delivery men, 400,000 vehicles and 200 aircraft to deliver Singles Day purchases.
The day was originally invented by students in the 1990's to celebrate single life, it was a kind of 'anti-Valentines Day.'
The holiday is celebrated on November 11th because the date, 11/11 is said to resemble 'bare branches' a Chinese expression for bachelors.
Alibaba latched on to the holiday and turned it into an annual day of sales. Other retailers have followed suit, including Amazon's Chinese site.
The money spent on the Chinese day to celebrate being single dwarf the US flagship day of online discounts, Cyber Monday, which only registered sales of $1.35bn last year.
Mobile sales have driven this strong performance, 73.9% of the purchases made in the first hour came from mobile devices.
These figures come against the backdrop of a series of poor economic indicators from China.
The latest industrial output statistics from China overnight show manufacturing output rose by just 5.6% year on year to the end of October – that’s lower than the 5.8% expected and further evidence that the world’s second largest economy is slowing.
