China’s annual “Singles Day” sales bonanza wraps up at midnight on Saturday (Nov 11), but consumers this year appear largely unswayed by its flashy deals and discounts as the world’s second-largest economy slows.
Conceived by tech giant Alibaba, Singles Day – which this year spanned well over a week – was launched in 2009 and has since ballooned into a yearly blockbuster retail period.
Sales for last year’s Singles Day reached 1.1 trillion yuan (US$153 billion), according to a recent report by consultancy firm Bain.
But among consumers surveyed by Bain this year, 77 percent said they did not plan to spend more than usual during the sales event.
“These days people are consuming less, people don’t really have much of a desire to buy lots of things,” recent graduate Zhang Chuwen, 23, told AFP.
She said her friends were instead using the sales to buy “everyday necessity products”.
Others say that this year’s Singles Day deals aren’t as good as in the past and that some websites had raised prices beforehand, only to cut them for the holiday.
For the second year running, Singles Day sales should still exceed 1 trillion yuan, said Vincent Marion, co-founder of VO2 Asia Pacific, a consultancy specialising in the digital economy.
“However, sales are stagnating due to the change in Chinese consumer habits, which now favour savings. Consumers have become better educated, more demanding, and more thoughtful in their spending,” he told AFP.
According to his firm, sales since Singles Day promotions began on October 24 were down 7.5 percent year-on-year.
