REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A journalist takes a picture of a screen showing real-time data of transactions at Alibaba Group's 11.11 Global shopping festival in Beijing, China, November 11, 2015.
- Singles Day is celebrated in China as an alternative to Valentine's Day.
- Alibaba pulled in more than $25 billion during this year's event.
- Shares are down 0.31% early Monday.
- Watch Alibaba's stock price move in real time here.
On Saturday, Chinese shoppers celebrated their romantic independence by spending more than $25.3 billion on Alibaba's e-commerce site during "Singles Day."
Shares of Alibaba are down 0.31% to $185.84 on the first day of trading following the event.
For scale, Singles Day was more than 25 times the size of Amazon's most recent Prime Day, where the company boasted more than $1 billion in sales.
Singles Day started as an obscure holiday celebrated by college students in China. Alibaba saw it as an opportunity, and in 2009, it offered its first discounts to celebrate the holiday, turning it into a country-wide phenomenon in only a few years.
The scale of Singles Day is just enormous. At one point, the company was processing 325,000 orders a second. In the first two hours, Alibaba raked in $12 billion. It processed more than 1.48 billion transactions in total and has processed 812 million total delivery orders.
Combining Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales would total just 30% of Alibaba's sales during the 2018 Singles Day celebrations.
Alibaba is up 109.99% this year.
