Alibaba smashes 11.11 records once again with over $30bn in sales

At the end of the festival, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang confirmed the final GMV total and claimed this milestone meant it was one step closer to eventually selling over 1 billion packages a day, an objective it is aiming to be hitting as an average per day in the future.

Calling the event ‘the Olympics for brands’, Alibaba’s sale day reached its 10th year this year and as part of the event, it ran its gala TV show to launch the event on Saturday. According to Alibaba, 250m people watched the event on TV, with a further 25m watching the stream online.

Alibaba said that, of the total purchases, 40% were of international brands, while some 237 brands exceeded RMB100 million in GMV, including leading international brands Apple, Dyson, Kindle, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, Nestlé, Gap, Nike and Adidas.

Outside China, come 230 regions got involved in purchasing items too. It was also the first year for Alibaba-owned Lazada to fully get involved in the festival, bringing the festival to consumers in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

According to the business, the top 10 categories for Chinese consumers were:

1 Health Supplements

2 Milk Powder

3 Facial Masks

4 Diapers

5 Serums

6 Infant and Toddler Nutrition

7 Emulsion

8 Face Wash

9 Makeup Remover

10 Toner

As of earlier in the evening, Alibaba also revealed the top 10 countries/regions selling to China by GMV:

1 Japan

2 United States

3 Korea

4 Australia

5 Germany

6 United Kingdom

7 France

8 Spain

9 New Zealand

10 Italy