Duncan Clark, chairman and MD of the business advisory BDA China, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday that the gala was a clever merging of Alibaba’s focuses on entertainment and shopping.
“In China, shopping is entertainment,” Clark said. “A lot of people [in inland cities] are tuning in to live broadcasts for products. Hundreds of thousands of people follow internet celebrities who use these platforms to sell.”
Clark noted that ensuring some spotlight hit its non-e-commerce arms was an opportunity for Alibaba to guarantee it could ride out any slowing of interest in Singles’ Day itself.
“Jack Ma likes to say that they’re no longer an e-commerce company. They’re sort of transcending that,” he said. “It’s about data, it’s about finance, it’s about media.”
Interest in e-commerce at present, however, remains strong.
Jessie Qian, head of consumer markets at KPMG China, told CNBC on Friday that mobile e-commerce transactions have been a major driver of China’s online sales boom. At least 90 percent of online shoppers in China had used their smartphone at least once to make a transaction, she said, and forecast that that number would continue to grow.
“There are several factors contributing to the growth in mobile users. First of all, it’s the access of cheaper mobile phones and secondly, the confidence in the third party payments (systems),” she said.
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