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Alibaba said its total gross merchandise value (GMV) over the Singles Day event, which spanned 11-days, totalled 498.2 billion yuan or $74.1 billion. That beat last year’s 268.4 billion yuan figure.
Alibaba

GUANGZHOU, China — The biggest shopping event in the world, Singles Day, is underway but China’s e-commerce giants will have to deal with economic growth potentially slowing as well as continued scrutiny from domestic regulators.

Singles Day — also known as Double 11 — takes place on Nov. 11 in China and is widely believed to have begun in the 1990s in universities as men celebrated being single. In 2009, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launched the first shopping event on that day, offering heavy discounts on its Tmall shopping platform.

Many of China’s online shopping companies have since jumped on the bandwagon, making Singles Day bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. combined.

Promotions begin earlier each year and are no longer limited to a 24-hour window.

JD.com and Alibaba kicked off promotions on Oct. 20, allowing customers to pay a deposit for items and secure the big discounts. Further discounts and promotions rolled out Sunday for JD.com and Monday for Alibaba.

Rising competition

The massive shopping event comes amid concerns over slowing growth in China’s economy and a recent slew of sluggish retail sales data.

But there are indications that consumers are still willing to spend on this year’s shopping festival. In a 3,000 person survey carried out by Bain & Company and published last week, slightly more than half (52%) of respondents said they were planning to spend more than last year, while only 8% said they were planning to decrease their spending.

Last year, Singles Day across all platforms raked in gross merchandise value of 840 billion yuan ($131.3 billion). GMV is a figure that shows the total value of orders across an e-commerce company’s platforms.

Jonathan Cheng, a partner at Bain, said he expects high levels of participation and sales growth. However, incumbents Alibaba and JD face rising competition from rivals such as Pinduoduo as well as the Chinese version of TikTok called Douyin, which is pushing further into e-commerce.

“There is a lot stronger competition from all types of platforms. It started out as an Alibaba festival, and it has now evolved into a general shopping festival,” Cheng said in an interview.

More than 50% of consumers in Bain’s survey said that they were planning to shop on three or more platforms during Double 11 this year.

Cheng added, however, that JD and Alibaba’s Tmall platform still have strong loyalty among consumers.

To continue growth momentum, Alibaba and JD.com have both looked to target customers in smaller Chinese cities, beyond the large metropolises.

Bain’s survey showed there would be more first-time Double 11 shoppers from so-called tier-three, four and five cities rather than tier-one and two cities.

“However at the same time, what they buy and how much they buy will also be less than higher tier cities,” Cheng said.

‘Common prosperity,’ sustainability

As JD and Alibaba head into Singles Day, their stocks have been pressured by increased regulatory scrutiny on China’s technology sector over the past year.

JD.com is about 27% off a record high hit in February while Alibaba has plunged 48% from its all-time high set in October 2020.

China has introduced new laws in areas from antitrust to data protection and has scrutinized the practices of e-commerce companies. Alibaba was hit with a $2.8 billion fine in April as a result of an anti-monopoly probe, with regulators criticizing a practice where the e-commerce giant forces merchants to choose one of two platforms, rather than being able to work with both.

Last week, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology called on e-commerce firms to curb marketing spam via text messages.

Against that backdrop, this year’s Singles Day brings with it a new feel — one where Alibaba and JD.com are looking to align themselves with Xi Jinping’s goal of “common prosperity” and progress on sustainability.

Common prosperity is the government’s push toward moderate wealth for all. And in the environmental space, China is targeting peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by the year 2060.

In past years, a key focus of Singles Day has been on GMV. Alibaba often has a rolling figure and a big celebration of the final number.

While this may still happen, Alibaba said the focus will be on sustainability and inclusivity.

“I believe the value that 11.11 [Double 11] offers is more than just the GMV figures. We are indeed optimistic about the Festival’s overall results, but more importantly, we are committed to building the future for the economy and online consumption,” Chris Tung, chief marketing officer of Alibaba, said in a press conference last week, according to a press release.

“11.11 is about how to best leverage Alibaba’s latest technology to support brands and merchants in driving sustainable and inclusive growth in more efficient ways.”

Alibaba’s logistics unit Cainiao will focus on recycling, while the company will also offer 100 million yuan worth of “green” vouchers “to incentivize shopping decisions that contribute to an environmentally-friendly lifestyle.”

JD.com also put a focus on sustainability saying that 2021 Singles Day will be “the largest one ever where renewable energy is being used.”

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire’s Mamdani comments

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire's Mamdani comments

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”

The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.

Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.

Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.

At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.

Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters:  you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”

By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”

“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”

Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”

Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia. 

The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.

The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.

Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.

However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.

“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.

Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.

“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.

Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Waymo said it will begin testing in Philadelphia, with a limited fleet of vehicles and human safety drivers behind the wheel.

“This city is a National Treasure,” Waymo wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s a city of love, where eagles fly with a gritty spirit and cheese that spreads and cheese that steaks. Our road trip continues to Philly next.”

The Alphabet-owned company confirmed to CNBC that it will be testing in Pennsylvania’s largest city through the fall, adding that the initial fleet of cars will be manually driven through the more complex parts of Philadelphia, including downtown and on freeways.

“Folks will see our vehicles driving at all hours throughout various neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, and from University City to as far east as the Delaware River,” a Waymo spokesperson said.

With its so-called road trips, Waymo seeks to collect mapping data and evaluate how its autonomous technology, Waymo Driver, performs in new environments, handling traffic patterns and local infrastructure. Road trips are often used a way for the company to gauge whether it can potentially offer a paid ride share service in a particular location.

The expanded testing, which will go through the fall, comes as Waymo aims for a broader rollout. Last month, the company announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York for testing, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan. State law currently doesn’t allow for such driverless operations.

Waymo One provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in 2026.

Alphabet has been under pressure to monetize artificial intelligence products as it bolsters spending on infrastructure. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which includes Waymo, brought in revenue of $1.65 billion in 2024, up from $1.53 billion in 2023. However, the segment lost $4.44 billion last year, compared to a loss of $4.09 billion the previous year.

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