Online Single’s Day sales in China hit $23 billion within the first nine hours of the event early Monday – equivalent to over 10 percent of all British ecommerce sales in 2018.
Single’s Day (so depicted owing to the four “lonely” ones in 11/11; a sign that means “bachelor” in China) is now the world’s biggest online sales event.
Sales hit 10 billion yuan (about £1.13 billion) 90 seconds after sales opened at midnight on Monday, China’s national Xinhua news agency reported, saying over 22,000 overseas brands from 200 countries and regions participated in this year’s retail events.
That’s up significantly from 19,000 brands from 75 countries and regions in 2018.
The capabilities of Alibaba Cloud to underpin the astonishing level of transactions is among its key foreign sales pitches, and the Alibaba subsidiary itself got in on the sales action, promising $600 worth of free compute to new customers and sharp price reductions across its services, including training courses for just $2.
Alibaba Cloud operates 61 availability zones in 20 regions around the world, including two availability zones in London.
It remains something of a minnow in the western cloud market, despite some high-profile customers. In the UK it promises the ability to process over 50,000 requests per second, with data transmission speeds of 1 Tbit/s.
Alibaba Building It’s Own Indigenous Processor
In July, meanwhile, Alibaba revealed its own indigenous processor based on the RISC-V open source chip architecture, as Beijing looks to wean industry off reliance on western silicon in the wake of Trump’s ban on sales of advanced technologies to Huawei.
Alibaba said its new Xuantie 910 can underpin advanced applications including edge computing and autonomous driving. The move will mitigate the risk of Chinese firms losing access to the widely used architecture of Softbank’s UK-based Arm, as well as reducing their licencing costs; even if they secure sustained access to Arm IP.
The processor appears to be the most powerful yet built using the RISC-V architecture, which names some heavyweight supporters, and lets users build their own system-on-chips by taking the royalty-free RISC-V cores from GitHub, customising/optimising them as they see fit, then passing the design to a fab lab of their choice.
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