--FILE--un ciclista cavalca la sua bicicletta elettrica passato un annuncio pubblicitario per il 2016 Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival cinese di e-commerce Alibaba gigante
--FILE--A cyclist rides his electric bike past an advertisement for the 2016 Tmall 11.11 Global Shopping Festival of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group at a bus stop in Beijing, China, 14 October 2016. It started out as a joke, but now it's an unofficial holiday. It's the day when productivity plummets. It's when people spend big. It's China's Singles Day. Alibaba, the online shopping giant that turned November 11 from a meme about Chinese college dudes being lonesome into a national institution, is the one shouting most loudly about the discounts and promotions on offer, ensuring nobody in the country can forget what's going on. The Singles Day in 2015 saw shoppers on Alibaba's marketplaces spend US$14.3 billion. That doesn't include all the stuff people bought on rival stores like JD, Amazon China, or literally hundreds of smaller sites and apps. Looking at the Singles Day spending on Alibaba's stores from 2009 to 2015, the trendline, assuming the growth continues, points to the festivities in 2016 seeing well over US$20 billion being spent in just one day.
