Singles Day couples China with the world

With a total transaction volume that is more than the volumes of Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon Prime Day combined, it is not surprising that the Singles Day shopping festival, which falls on Nov 11 each year, has become a barometer for consumer confidence in China.

While the total sales volume this year is yet to be released, the numbers available indicate it will be another record-breaking year for the shopping gala, whose transaction volume has surged from $7 million in 2009, when Alibaba launched the event, to $30.8 billion last year.

With the total gross merchandise volume settled through Alibaba’s payments platform Alipay hitting 100 billion yuan ($14.3 billion) within 63 minutes and 59 seconds — 43 minutes ahead of last year’s pace — and an estimated half a billion people believed to have swarmed Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, scooping up everything from refrigerators to running shoes, the purchasing power and enthusiasm of Chinese consumers shows no signs of having been diminished by the trade war the United States is waging against China.

This demonstration of the robustness of Chinese consumption is good news for the country’s policymakers who have continued to promote the transition from investment and exports to consumption and innovation as the country’s economic drivers despite the pressure from the US.

Actually, consumption has already been the main driver of China’s economic growth for five consecutive years and the country is set to overtake the US to become the world’s largest retail market, mainly thanks to policies to expand domestic demand, such as cutting taxes, increasing imports and opening up the service industry wider to foreign investors, all of which injected impetus into consumption growth.

And apart from wealthy urbanites in the big metropolises, the rising spending power in the country’s less-developed regions, especially the rural market that has seen rapidly growing incomes among farmers, means the consumption potential to be unleashed in the years to come will continue to sustain this new growth model.

Innovative digitalization has facilitated this trend as it has made consumption more convenient with e-commerce platforms offering a greater diversity of products to shoppers, and electronic payments making purchasing simply click-andbuy wherever the shoppers may be.

All of this means the potential of the Chinese market is huge, with the country’s middle-income group continuing to expand rapidly. And with President Xi Jinping pledging in his speech at the opening ceremony of the second China International Import Expo in Shanghai that China will foster a more robust domestic market and give greater importance to imports, Chinese consumers will not only continue to boost growth at home, they will also be a force driving global growth.