Alibaba's Singles' Day smashes world records once again, but overall growth is slower this year. (Photo : Getty Images)
Alibaba saw a tamer Singles' Day festival this year as customers sought for bigger discounts and growth slowed down.
The Jack Ma-led company posted a record 120.7 billion yuan in sales but overall growth was significantly slower at 32 percent, with the decline blamed on cautious shoppers.
Last year's growth saw a 60 percent increase, according to Reuters.
China's Singles' Day, which started out as a festival for young and unattached Chinese people, is now the world's biggest shopping event, even outstripping the combined sales of Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the U.S.
With sealed deals worth millions, it is also seen as the "barometer for the e-commerce industry and consumer economy in China as a whole," wrote Reuters.
Alibaba is responsible for transforming this event into what it is today when it launched its own version of the holiday in 2009. Since then, Singles' Day has transformed to become a gauge of China's very own retail industry.
This year's festival, however, was under more pressure as it tried to repeat its previous feats in the face of decreasing number of Internet users in China, among other hurdles.
"The very dynamics that helped Alibaba engineer the Hallmark-like holiday out of thin air have turned against it," wrote the New York Times.
"Growth in new Internet users is slowing in China, as is growth in the number of Chinese people and companies opening stores on Alibaba's sales platforms. More important, growth in the value of the goods sold on the company's platforms is decelerating."
Alibaba's accounting practices were also being questioned by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, clouding the company's official sales figures with doubts.
Alibaba's metrics can also be "confusing" as the company adopts a statistic called gross merchandise value, which "measures the monetary worth of transactions that flow through its services," wrote the NYT.
"Gross merchandise value is also not defined under accounting standards, and critics have grown increasingly skeptical of the numbers. For example, it does not include returns, which for Singles' Day can be as high as 30 percent of sales," the NYT reported.
