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Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com said they achieved sales growth during this year's Singles' Day shopping festival, but stopped short of disclosing exact revenue numbers for the second straight year, as they grapple with a stop-start economic recovery in China and a brutal price war.
Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall Group said on Sunday its gross merchandise value (GMV) - a measure of the total value of goods sold - as well as the number of orders and participating merchants, all recorded year-on-year growth during this shopping season, which started with a presale period on its platforms on October 24 and concluded on November 11.
As of Saturday midnight, 402 brands each surpassed 100 million yuan (US$13.7 million) in GMV, while 38,000 brands achieved over 100 per cent year-on-year GMV growth, according to Taobao and Tmall Group.
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"Taobao and Tmall's solid performance reflects the success of our user-first strategy, which is focused on competitive pricing, diverse content offerings and AI-driven technologies that further optimised consumer and merchant experiences during the campaign," said Trudy Dai Shan, CEO of Taobao and Tmall Group.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
A Singles' Day display at the headquarters of JD.com in Beijing. Photo: AP Photo
Rival JD.com, which kicked off its Double 11 campaign on October 23, said on Sunday that transaction volume, order volume and user engagement reached all-time highs, calling this year's shopping festival another "record-breaking" event.
The Beijing-based company said the transaction volume of more than 60 brands each surpassed 1 billion yuan, with nearly 20,000 brands registering a threefold year-on-year increase in transaction volume.
Despite the positive tone, this marks another year the two e-commerce giants have decided not to publish their exact sales numbers.
Alibaba said at the time that its Singles' Day campaign "delivered results in line with last year's GMV performance", while JD.com said it had set a "record-breaking" 11-day Singles' Day campaign, using the same words that it did this year.
The Singles' Day shopping festival, initiated by Alibaba in 2009, is the world's largest online retail extravaganza. The annual bargain-hunting ritual, originally a 24-hour event on November 11, has in recent years stretched into a weeks-long event lasting from late October to mid-November, joined by new players such as Kuaishou Technology and US-listed discount retailer PDD Holdings, which operates the Pinduoduo platform.