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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Bitcoin slumped on Tuesday as a spike in Treasury yields weighed on risk assets broadly.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 4.8% at $97,183.80, according to Coin Metrics. The broader market of cryptocurrencies, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped more than 5%.
The moves followed a sudden increase in the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield after data released by the Institute for Supply Management reflected faster-than-expected growth in the U.S. services sector in December, adding to concerns about stickier inflation. Rising yields tend to pressure growth oriented risk assets.
Bitcoin traded above $102,000 on Monday and is widely expected to about double this year from that level. Investors are hopeful that clearer regulation will support digital asset prices and in turn benefit stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood.
However, uncertainty about the path of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts could put bumps in the road for crypto prices. In December, the central bank signaled that although it was cutting rates a third time, it may do fewer rate cuts in 2025 than investors had anticipated. Historically, rate cuts have had a positive effect on bitcoin price while hikes have had a negative impact.
Bitcoin is up more than 3% since the start of the year. It posted a 120% gain for 2024.
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The company, which offers a range of direct-to-consumer treatments for conditions like weight loss, erectile dysfunction and hair loss, is the latest in a string of tech companies that have tried to curry favor with the incoming administration. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta both announced $1 million donations to the inaugural fund late last year, and Amazon and Apple CEO Tim Cook have also reportedly contributed.
“At Hims & Hers, we stand with leaders and advocates who are committed to improving America’s broken healthcare system,” the company said in a statement to CNBC.
Hims & Hers was a breakout star in the digital health sector last year, largely thanks to the success of its popular new weight loss offering.
The company began prescribing compounded semaglutide through its platform in May after launching a weight loss program late in 2023. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster medications Ozempic and Wegovy, which can cost around $1,000 a month without insurance. Compounded semaglutide is a cheaper, custom-made alternative to the brand drugs and can be produced when the brand-name treatments are in shortage.
The future of compounded GLP-1s in the U.S. is not entirely clear, especially as members of Trump’s circle have expressed conflicting opinions about the drugs more broadly. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has criticized GLP-1s. He told CNBC in an interview that “the first line of response” to obesity should be lifestyle changes, though he added that “GLP drugs have a place.”
Dr. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, has served as an executive of the telehealth company Sesame, which connects consumers to physicians who can prescribe compounded GLP-1s. However, Makary’s role at Sesame has been mostly ceremonial in recent years.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who has been a close confidant of Trump’s since the election, has openly expressed his support for the medications.
“Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X in December.
At an event with reporters in New York City late last year, which was attended by CNBC, Hims & Hers said it would work with the incoming administration and share the company’s point of view about the value of the medications.
Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Musk‘s platform X.
The company said Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said the third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” stating, “We should have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online.”
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” and said Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s platform X has been working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal advocate for Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policy officer, succeeding Nick Clegg, who was a former British deputy prime minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party.
Kaplan, who has held several policy-related positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still named Facebook, is well known within the Republican Party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also once worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook post that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit at the New York Stock Exchange.
“We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said Tuesday.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which provides an independent check of the company’s content moderation, lauded the company’s changes on Tuesday.
“The Oversight Board welcomes the news that Meta will revise its approach to fact-checking, with the goal of finding a scalable solution to enhance trust, free speech and user voice on its platforms,” the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “specifically in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach has been perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”
Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other technology companies for allegations regarding the censorship of conservative voices on their respective platforms. For instance, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of a probe to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect more recently describing Facebook as an “enemy of the people” in a March interview with CNBC. Meta levied a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021 shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if he were to violate the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed Trump’s account-related restrictions in July during the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The company has taken additional steps to appease the incoming administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, is joining its board.
Following Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big technology executives who visited the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.
