Alibaba Breaks Record in Double 11 Sales
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Staff members communicate with customers at the Three Squirrels company in Wuhu City, east China's Anhui Province, Nov. 11, 2015. E-commerce transactors got busy on the annual Singles Day which fell on Wednesday. [Photo: Xinhua]

The online retailer Alibaba says it surpassed last year’s Singles Day sales level in the first twelve hours of trading today.

Within just 12 minutes 28 seconds of midnight, sales via Alibaba's Tmall hit a record high, with over 10 billion yuan, or 1.6 billion US dollars being spent by bargain hungry singletons.

72% of the sales were made via mobile platforms.

Duncan Clark, Chairman of Investment Advisory Strategy Consulting, was invited to address the Tmall TV gala in Beijing ahead of the festival.

"You know E-commerce is winning more and more customers in China. It could win things like groceries. So I think, you know, we don't need to validate E-commerce anymore. The question is how rapidly is it taking over."

Meanwhile, JD.com, China's second largest online retailer, also reported that the number of its online orders reached 10 million in the first 10 hours of the shopping festival.

Alibaba initiated China's first annual online sale on Single's day 7 years ago. At that time only 27 online merchants took part.

For more on this year's double 11 shopping spree, CRI's Wang Mengzhen earlier spoke with Professor Liu Baocheng, from the University of International Business and Economics.

Author： 　　　Source：xinhua　　　 Editor：Yang Fan