BEIJING, November 11 (TMTPOST)— During the world’s largest annual online shopping holiday Singles Day , Alibaba created another sales record, but for the Chinese e-commerce giant that first launched the event in 2009, the sales achievement seems no longer a priority in the regulatory tightening environment in its home market.

Source: Visual China

As of 00: 00 a.m. Beijing Time November 12, 2021, Alibaba’s Singles Day, also known as Double 11, generated a total of RMB54.03 billion (US$84 billion) in sales from the first day of the month, exceeding the previous sales record of RMB 498.2 billion it set for the event last year.

Alibaba’s peer JD.com also shattered its own record in Singles Day with Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) topping RMB349.1 billion (US$54 billion). It posted a more than 28% jump compared to the first 11 days of November a year earlier, slightly slower than the 33% increase year-over-year (YoY), while Alibaba’s 8% YoY rise was much slower than last year’s 26%.

However, both of these Chinese e-commerce firms’ publicity around the bonanza results this year was muted compared with previous years. Alibaba didn’t frequently update any sales data on November 11, the peak of the whole event, neither keeping track of spending over 24-hour that day on at a giant board. And JD’s releases that day were significantly less than before.

Instead, Alibaba highlighted milestones which the small-and-medium sized businesses (SMEs) achieved on its platform. Hailed as the leapfrog development, brands of these businesses had such a robust growth in sales that 698 brands which hit RMB1 million GMV topped RMB10 million. SMEs’ sales performance and their experience on our platform is one of key indicators for us to measure this year’s event, Alibaba added. JD noted this year’s Double 11 witnessed the fastest growth for SMEs as the newcomer small and medium brands sold on its platform in the event increased more than fourfold from a year earlier.

Right after Alibaba and JD disclosed their Sings Day sales, China’s state media the Securities Daily published a commentary titled “Stop the Worship of GMV for Singles Day”. The news paper called on accelerating the focus transition from marketing to technology. “We hope one day ‘Singles Day’ will see traffic war and sales war replaced by technology competition, evolving into a holiday for platforms and vendors to show their results in ‘creativity, harmony, environment-friendliness, openness and sharing’ in a year,” it said.