61% Singles' Day boost for Anta Group
2021-11-17
Source:footwearbiz
Author：
This year’s Singles’ Day - or Double 11 - shopping festival not only resulted in record-breaking sales for China’s two biggest e-commerce players, Alibaba and JD.com, but also saw a 61% increase in turnover for the country’s largest sports group, Jinjiang-headquartered Anta.
The group, which owns sportswear brands Anta and Fila (as well as Descente and Kolon Sport in mainland China and Hong Kong) achieved total sales of ¥4.65 billion or roughly $728.8 million across all e-commerce platforms.
On Alibaba’s Tmall platform alone, Anta’s brands accounted for more than 22% of the total transaction share, local media reported. Tmall search data during Alibaba’s 11-day promotional period, which began on November 1, suggested that the group’s flagship Anta brand alone ranked second overall in the sports shoes and apparel category. It topped the list of domestic brands.
Executive director and vice president of the group, Bi Mingwei, commented: “Double 11 is a big test of brand strategy and operational capabilities. Analysis, precise forecasting, coordinated operations across the value chain and data-driven decision-making all supported our high-quality growth during this Double 11.”
Alibaba reported its gross merchandise volume (GMV) for the 11-day period leading up to the traditional shopping date, November 11, whereas JD revealed transaction volume figures for its own promotional period, which began at 8pm on October 31.
The former said that its GMV amounted to ¥540.3 billion (around $84.5 billion). Although this represented another record broken for the platform, the figure will also be remembered as the first time Alibaba’s Singles’ Day did not achieve double-digit growth.
Rather, the e-commerce giant’s GMV only increased by about 8.5% on the previous year. For context, the comparative (double-digit) figure for 2020’s Alibaba-powered festival was almost double that which was achieved during the 2019 event.
Several commentators have attributed Alibaba’s relatively slowed progress to recent wealth redistribution signals from China’s president, Xi Jinping, in addition to a general sense of fatigue and wariness around incentivised shopping in the country at present.
JD, meanwhile, reported a 28% boost to its own transaction volumes on the year previous, reaching an all-time high of ¥349.1 billion or $54.6 billion.
Alibaba Group president, Michael Evans, commented: “The e-commerce environment continues to be very vibrant. China remains an incredibly important market for brands to find growth today, but also growth in the future.”
Chief marketing officer at the Hangzhou-headquartered enterprise, Chris Tung, added: [Double 11] is about how to best leverage Alibaba’s latest technology to support brands and merchants in driving sustainable and inclusive growth in more efficient ways.”
JD, for its part, emphasised that 77% of its total users throughout the sales period hailed from smaller or so-called lower-tier Chinese cities, a relatively underexposed customer base upon which it remains acutely focused.
Alibaba observed a similar trend: from November 1 through 3, when its own promotional period began, spending from lower-tier and relatively rural populations increased by almost 25% on the year before.
Singles’ Day is thought to have been started by four bachelors at Nanjing University in 1993, as a form of protest against China’s Double Seventh festival (also known as Qixi festival or Chinese Valentine’s Day), which traditionally falls on the seventh day of the seventh Chinese lunar month.
The pronunciation of 11.11 (hence the name Double 11, an alternate name for Singles’ Day) in Mandarin Chinese sounds similar to a Chinese idiom meaning “a whole lifetime” or “all my life”. It also looks like four single people standing in a line.
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