Alibaba Shatters Singles Day Sales Record

Investing.com - Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) has taken Singles Day and the e-commerce world by storm. Singles Day is so called because it falls on November 11th, which is written numerically as 4 times the number 1. It started in China as a festival for young, unmarried adults, but in 2009, internet giant Alibaba turned the day into a massive online shopping event. Now, as Alibaba cofounder and vice chairman Joseph Tsai phrased it: “On Singles Day, shopping is a sport, it's entertainment.”Last year, Alibaba said Singles Day sales hit $17.8 billion. This year, shoppers from more than 200 countries and regions participated, and Alibaba ended up raking in more than $1 billion per hour, topping a record $25.3 billion in all. Alibaba's singles day revenue is more than double all of the biggest US shopping holidays combined. In 2016, Adobe data showed that online sales from Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday added up to approximately $8.7 billion. Estimates from this year’s Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime Day reach as much as $2.2 billion, but all together, that’s still nowhere near Alibaba’s Singles Day haul.Alibaba's stock price has almost doubled year to date from 89 dollars to 186 dollars, and the Chinese giant doesn't look like it's about to cool down anytime soon.