The Big Double Eleven

Ma Yun, Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of  of Alibaba Group has been known as the richest man in China as of November 2014. The time of the news is interesting, and I believe he is likely to rank the first again in November of this year.

The biggest company under the group is call T.Mall. Similar to Amazon, it's a website for online shopping.

Today, I wanna to discuss the phenomena about a newly Holiday in China, and the back push of it.

The holiday ,we called "Double Eleven" or"Single Day" has a very interesting original. In my memory,  it's about 2009' winter, when the date November 11st coming, people found the date can be written as "11.11", and every ''1'' has been called as a person who don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend. We have Valentine’s Day, but there's no holiday for single person. So people spontaneously named this date to be the "Single Day" for fun. Although it's not a official holiday, the influence of it is still huge.

After the "foundation" of it, there's a movie that pushed the date to a even more popular place. On November 11st 2011( also can be written as "11.11.11" has been call "God single day",means God would also be single on that day.), the movie call"Love is not blind" has been shown. The movie described how a girl being dumped and getting recover in 33 days. Under the effect of "God Single Day", the movie achieved a huge success in box office, and also the holiday has been more impressive in public's mind.

I wondered it must be the online sales store that created the saying "when a girl being hurt in love ,the most effective to recover is shopping". Anyway, out of no reason, almost all the online stores aimed on this day, and giving out the strongest discount. It has became a Black Friday in China.

Among all the store, T.Mall is undoubtedly the No.1 in the industry. Here is a brief conclusion of the performance on that day in T.Mall. Actually I was shocked by those numbers every time. Here is the bar chart described sales value on November 11th from 2009, the unit of it is 100million yuan.(The number of this year is a estimate one).

Last year, the sale value has almost be 60 billion yuan, and this year, the record has been broken in 11 hours and 50 minutes.

Several sales record has been updated, such as "reaching 10million yuan in 18 seconds", "12min'29" for 10billion yuan" and ended up with "92.1 billion yuan" for the day.

The crazy numbers showed the purchase power of Chinese, and the magic of marketing. Mayun even held a Gala for it this year, and attempt to invite American president Barack Obama(being rejected though). And "James Bond" Daniel Craig has shown on that stage.