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The backers of the bid for pharmaceutical giant Sigma Healthcare are confident the competition regulator won't knock back their takeover offer for the second time.

Sigma shares soared 45 per cent on Friday after Australian Pharmaceutical Industries (API) snatched up a 13 per cent stake in its rival and unveiled a $726 million indicative takeover bid.

API said it had tabled a non-binding indicative proposal to Sigma's board in October, which offers Sigma investors 0.31 API shares and 23¢ cash for each Sigma share they own. The proposal is subject to due diligence and approval by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The suitor faced questions about whether the competition regulator would allow the merger of what will be the second and third largest players in the industry 16 years after it knocked back their last attempt at a deal.

API said the value of the proposal equates to 68.6¢ a Sigma share, which represents a 69 per cent premium to the target's closing share price on Thursday of 40.5¢. Sigma shares rocketed 48 per cent to 60¢ on Friday.

AuMake International Limited has joined forces with JD Worldwide, a division of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, to create a new omnichannel platform for Australian and New Zealand brands to reach Chinese customers.

The strategic agreement, which was signed in Sydney on Tuesday, will see JD combine its online and logistics capability in China with AuMake’s retail store and brand building capabilities in Australia.

The partnership mirrors a similar agreement between Alibaba’s Tmall and Chemist Warehouse, the companies noted in a statement.

The agreement builds on the booming daigou industry in Australia and New Zealand, where personal shoppers, often Chinese students or tourists, buy and ship products on behalf of family, friends and other clients in China.

AuMake over the past two years has expanded its chain of retail stores catering to daigou shoppers with relevant products and services.

Under the agreement, AuMake will become JD’s exclusive retail store partner in Australia and New Zealand and connect existing and future store customers to its online flagship on JD’s cross-border platform, JD Worldwide.

JD, under the agreement, will fully support AuMake’s online flagship, with an initial sales target of 10 million RMB ($2 million) per month, and provide access to its warehouse and dispatch logistics network in China.

The companies will also work together to incubate and develop new brands to be exclusively sold on the JD Worldwide platform and in AuMake retail stores.

AuMake executive chairman Keong Chan (pictured above, right) called the agreement a “company-changing event”.

“This is a company changing event for AuMake and confirms the value that we have created so far via our retail store distribution network in Sydney,” he said.

“Under this collaboration with JD Worldwide, AuMake will now be able to reach hundreds of millions of customers in China with new brands and products, including brands and products owned by AuMake.”

Keong added that he believes AuMake and JD together can fundamentally change the way in which Australian and New Zealand products reach the Chinese market.

Australian consumer awareness of Cyber Weekend has increased dramatically in the past three years with expectations now that deals will be on offer, as reported by Salesforce.

1. Shoppers turned to their mobile devices more than ever this Cyber Week.

66% of all traffic and 54% of all orders came from a mobile device with peak days seeing 72% and 58% respectively.

Salesforce ecommerce expert James Johnson said that consumers are more likely to complete purchases during the sale period.

“Consumers are in control and choose how they wish to interact and transact with brands and retailers.

“They are increasingly using mobile to do so.

“They are also more likely to complete purchases, with global data showing a significant jump in conversion rates.”

2. Black Friday won the revenue race

Australian retailers experienced a 15% year-over-year growth in digital revenue with the Saturday after Black Friday seeing the greatest year-over-year gains.

The biggest digital revenue producing day was Black Friday, followed by Cyber Monday.

“Retailers are responding to this awareness and expectation, with the opportunity cost of not participating increasing,” Johnson said.

“There is a race to release deals earlier to beat competitors.”

3. The average discount was 31%

During the sale period, retailers offered an average discount rate of 31%, up slightly from 30% in 2017.

Cyber Sunday was the best digital discount with the average retailer offering a 34% discount, followed by Cyber Monday at 33%.

“There is a growing importance in brands and retailers running connected campaigns and experiences, combining the right message, to the right customer, at the right time,” Johnson said.

Australian companies such as Treasury Wine Estates, Blackmores and A2 Milk could benefit from new moves in China to boost the e-commerce market announced last week.

China’s Ministry of Finance announced last week that it will lift the annual duty free limit for individuals buying goods overseas by 30 per cent to 26,000 yuan, around $5078.

It is also adding to the list of products which can be imported into China duty free on cross border e-commerce platforms — goods including sparkling wine, beer made from malt, fitness equipment and condoms.

The higher caps, which will come into effect from January, along with other major changes to e-commerce regulations, are set to further boost the potential for sales into China of high-quality foreign consumer goods.

Figures from China’s Ministry of Commerce show retail imports into China on e-commerce platforms rose by 54 per cent to a record 67.2 billion yuan ($13.1bn) for the first 10 months of this year.

The ministry said it would be more than doubling the cap on individual duty free transactions from 2000 to 5000 yuan and signalled it could increase the total annual cap in future in line with rising incomes.

The higher import ceiling will be good for the daigou market in Australia, where personal shoppers sell a range of consumer products to their friends and family in China, and for Australian companies selling their products directly into China on e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba’s TMall Global.

But it comes at a time when the Chinese government is also tightening e-commerce regulations from next year with stricter requirements on labelling, formalisation of import channels, reporting requirements and moves to increase liability on exporters and e-commerce channels to prevent fraud and fake products.

Australian companies selling through e-commerce channels in China have been closely watching the impact of the new regulations and clarifications being announced in recent weeks as the Chinese government seeks to have more regulatory control over the rapidly growing e-commerce import sector.

A2 Milk chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka said the company welcomed the latest round of guidance on how the new e-commerce laws will work when they come into effect next year.

Foreign companies have been given a grace period until the end of March to comply with the changes.

Ms Hrdlicka said the latest round of statements issued last week provided further clarity on issues such as defining the major participants within the cross border e-commerce channel and their responsibilities.

She said English label products which complied with their country of origin regulations would still be able to be sold through cross-border e-commerce channels provided that the Chinese consumers had access to an electronic Chinese translation of the packaging label.

Other requirements include the need for adequate product traceability systems, return and exchange systems, product recall systems and consumer dispute handling processes.

They also include real time reporting of transaction, payment and to Chinese customs.

The higher duty free cap announcement made last week follows comments by China’s President Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Import Expo last month that China would be taking measures to boost its e-commerce business including cross-border e-commerce sales.

China sees the moves as opening the local market for more high quality foreign products and encouraging Chinese companies to upgrade their production by exposing them to competition.

A spokeswoman for Treasury Wine Estates, one of the largest foreign suppliers of wine to the China market, said the company did not want to comment on the latest Ministry of Finance announcements.

While the higher caps will help boost the total e-commerce market in China for foreign goods, the tighter regulations being introduced will put pressure on Australian companies to comply.

Concerns about the extent of the new changes saw the Chinese government announce last month that it would delay the implementation of some parts of the new laws by three months to give exporters more time to comply.

Export-oriented shares on the Australian stockmarket surged yesterday.

A2 Milk jumped 5.3 per cent to $10.3, Blackmores rose 3.2 per cent to $127.95 and Bellamy’s surged 12.02 per cent to $8.20.

Treasury Wine Estates, one of the largest foreign suppliers of wine to the China market, swelled 3.6 per cent to $14.66.

Australian consumers are expected to spend $1 billion online from Friday, November 23, to Monday, November 26, the four-day period known as Black Friday/Cyber Monday, according to CashRewards.

CashRewards founder and retail expert Andrew Clarke expects sales over the four-day period to nearly double last year’s figures. This equates to an estimated $1.3 billion in online spending, with the average spend per consumer expected to be $263, according to Black Friday Global.

In the US, where the Black Friday sales event originated, GlobalData Retail managing director Neil Saunders projected that total spending would rise by 5.7 per cent over 2017 to US$59.6 billion ($82.38 billion) – the highest growth since 2011.

“Online is taking a greater share of sales this year than last, with spend set to grow by 33 per cent. Stores will also see growth, but at a more muted 1.9 per cent,” Saunders said.

“Both rates of increase are the highest for at least the past five years.”

According to Numerator, 2018 has seen larger discounts across every category surveyed for the period, such as entertainment (34.5 per cent to 40.3 per cent), jewelry (62.9 per cent to 67.3 per cent) and women’s outerwear (56.8 per cent to 66.1 per cent).

Highs and lows

The increasing popularity of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales in Australia can be seen in the record-breaking $5 million in sales that Catch saw on Friday, topping the company’s previous single-day sales record record of $3 million.

It can also be seen in the crash of JB Hi-Fi’s website on Friday, when servers proved unable to cope with high volumes of traffic.

“Yep. People want the goods. Our IT team is trying to get our servers together,” the company tweeted on 1.19 pm Friday, before getting the issue resolved by 4.13 pm.

According to IBISWorld senior industry analyst James Thompson, a crashed website during a peak sales event such as Black Friday runs the risk of disappointing consumers.

“This can both adversely affect sales, and leave consumers frustrated, with the potential to reduce consumer participation,” Thompson said.

Video games popular on Amazon

Online marketplace Amazon, which held its first Black Friday event in Australia this year, noted a distinct trend in the purchase of entertainment and video game items.

“Customers have snapped up deals across the board with video games and games consoles being the best-selling of all the deals on the first day of our Black Friday Deals Event,” Amazon Australia country manager Rocco Braeuniger said.

According to Amazon, the top deal over the period was “save 35 per cent off select video games,” with the best-selling video game being the recently released Red Dead Redemption II, followed by a discounted Nintendo Switch gaming console.

This trend translated into the toy category as well, with the Fortnite Edition Monopoly board game being the best-selling toy on Amazon for the period.

But Amazon said on Wednesday that in response to "customer feedback", it would reopen its American and other international sites to Australian shoppers.

Amazon boxes will be winging their way to Australia once more.CREDIT:BLOOMBERG

Products from third-party sellers using Amazon's marketplace - estimated to account for about half of Amazon.com's total sales - will remain blocked while the company works out how to apply GST to those sales.

"Earlier this year, Amazon assessed changes to the Australian GST law... and, in order to remain compliant with the legislation, made the difficult decision to suspend exports from our international stores to Australia," the company said in a statement

"Following the announcement of these changes, we listened to the customer feedback and assessed how we could respond.

"Since that time, our teams have continued to focus their efforts on building the complex infrastructure needed to enable exports of low-value goods to Australia and remain compliant with GST laws."

Amazon.com.au now lists about 80 million products, compared with about 500 million on Amazon's US site.

Amazon sent its local website live late last year, and now has two "fulfilment centres" in Melbourne and Sydney shipping items to customers.

Rival online trader eBay had threatened to block foreign sellers from its marketplace if the tax changes went ahead, but was able to implement a way to collect GST from third-party sellers before the laws came into effect.

Citi analysts estimated before the launch of Amazon's local site late last year that Australians spent between $500 million and $700 million on Amazon annually.

There is a great deal of fear around the advent and pace of AI advancements. But while it’s a human survival mechanism to fear the unknown, we’re not facing extinction just yet. Rather than being something to fear, AI represents incredible opportunities for human advancement, especially around the ways in which we view, pursue and experience work.

The more I learn about and experience AI, the more inspired I am both as a human and in my work researching and implementing innovations for brands in the digital marketplace. Which is why I watched the recent Q&A episode on artificial intelligence with a vested interest. On the panel, which pivoted at first around the technology and culture of sexbots before moving to a general (almost as intriguing) exploration of AI’s future, AI expert Toby Walsh from the University of NSW expressed his belief in the inherent threat that AI poses to society.

Professor Walsh believes that in 50 or 100 years, AI will be “indistinguishable from the real thing” and suggested that this was not society’s ideal progression. “We’re wonderful because we’re human and don’t have any need to replace us as humans,” he said.

While I follow Walsh’s logic, the assertion that when AI becomes “indistinguishable” from humans we will be “replaced” is problematic. AI will indeed have a huge (and as yet mostly unknown) impact on the human experience, yet the more sophisticated AI can be in grasping human emotion and logic, the better it will do those “dull, dirty and repetitive tasks” that so often dominate our days.

What the fear around AI is not recognising is that AI can already be considered “indistinguishable” from humans. That’s not to say we have robots walking among us that we mistake for flesh and blood. But AI has been passing the Turing tests, which measure a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour identical to a human’s, for many years now. The most significant example of this was in 2014, when a computer program called Eugene Goostman (simulating a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy) passed the Turing test at an event organised by the University of Reading.

Look at Google’s demo of their AI assistant (known as Google Duplex) earlier this year, which involved it phoning a hairdresser to make an appointment for its user. Not only did the assistant sound like a human, its speech was peppered with “umms” and “errs”, and it was also able to overcome a curveball — the desired appointment time not being available. The person on the other end was completely unaware that their entire conversation was being conducted with a computer.

There is room on the spectrum for both machine intelligence and human intelligence. We’ve got a real opportunity to harness AI’s human-like capacity so that it can navigate the web of mundane tasks, allowing us to redistribute our brainpower, energy and creativity into meaningful activities.

There’s no doubt that great advances in technology also come with great responsibility. This is another “scary” reality that we as a society can relish, rather than run from. As another Q&A panel member, commentator Vanessa Badham, said: “If we’re scared of robots, let’s legislate their use. If we’re scared of AI, let’s legislate it. If we’re worried about biases, let’s create a regulatory framework. We’re not actually disempowered.”

Yes! The direction and legislation of AI is a greenfield area and is creating really interesting questions for us to work out how we want to move forward. In the online retail space, AI has already contributed to huge advances in terms of personalisation that have revolutionised the customer experience. Think about the chatbot that greets you as you browse a website and knows what you’re likely to be digging for — perhaps before you do — and serves up a curated selection of relevant content and products.

In the e-commerce industry, the unknowns are a cause for excitement, experimentation and growth. That same excitement can be embraced by society more broadly as the process of productivity shifts.

Historically, we have had to work to find food, shelter and ways to survive. In this new and future age of AI, we have the opportunity to rethink what “work” really means. For many of us (in first-world countries at least), it’s no longer about securing food and shelter — it’s about thriving and prospering. If managed correctly, AI could provide us with the time and the fiscal freedom to decide what we truly want to do with our lives.

To foster this concept, Bill Gates and others have suggested an adapted form of the universal basic income by taxing companies that reap the benefits of technology at a higher rate. This is then distributed to those whose jobs AI renders redundant so they can transition into new work and pursuits that are meaningful and rewarding. A utopian ideal, perhaps, but just as AI has improved rapidly, so can these utopian concepts.

Vincent Corneille is performance marketing lead for digital agency Overdose Digital.

Gen Z, the latest young, hyper-connected age group whose habits are a direct reflection of their exposure to digital devices, are fast coming of age. With members of the cohort fresh out of high school, these teenagers look set to become the dominant influencers of tomorrow. From their experience as a consumer to how they function in the workplace, Gen Z’s set of unique attributes will undoubtedly come to change the way organisations ­operate.

In the race to remodel services and build better digital user experiences, organisations are using emerging technologies to collect data and build new products and services. As a result, more and more data is being collected, with the intent to do some analysis and then monetise it.

With the rise of compliance rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from the European Union, the pressure is on organisations to manage all of that data more carefully than ever. To boot, there has also been a lot of spotlight around personal data breaches recently — alarming stories of how our digital footprints are being harvested to drive commercial and political outcomes, creating increased consumer awareness around how their data is being used.

Born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, Gen Z are digital natives, more willing and open to share information in exchange for value. With organisations embarking on some form of digital transformation many are seeking to better understand the expectations and preferences of Gen Z well ahead of time. In fact, as a ­result of how comfortable they are with relinquishing personal data, organisations are now inundated with the sheer volume of information — something they’ve never planned for.

To manage this, many have started to use analytics tools, artificial intelligence and cloud services, among others, to process the data and make sense of it all. However, this has created ­additional copies, which has ­further added to the data spiral.

With stricter data compliance laws such as Australia’s Notifiable Data Breach and GDPR now in full force, organisations are much more accountable for what they do with all that spiralling data. There are hefty financial penalties for noncompliance, but potentially more damaging than the regulatory fines will be the reputational damage if organisations don’t handle personal data with care.

To effectively manage the flood of data, organisations must always make it a point to ask themselves the following six questions:

1. What are we collecting?

2. Why are we collecting it?

3. How will we use the data?

4. Where will we store the data?

5. Who has access to the data?

6. What is our data deletion strategy?

Getting a clear picture of the personal data you hold makes it a great deal easier to ensure regulatory compliance. Once organisations know where it all exists, they will be able to analyse risk accurately and put the right ­remedial actions in place.

Importantly, organisations who can effectively collect, store, analyse and harness the value of information will ultimately find themselves in a stronger position to maximise opportunities and stay ahead of the curve.

NEW YORK, United States — In 2003, Craig Nevill-Manning, a computer scientist at Google, wanted to set up an engineering outpost in New York. Google’s top leaders were skeptical, but they told him that he could go ahead if he could find 15 “Google-worthy” software developers in the city.

“The attitude was that pretty much all the good software engineers were in Silicon Valley,” Mr Nevill-Manning recalled. “It seems crazy in retrospect.”

Mr Nevill-Manning found his developers and opened the engineering office in New York. Today, Google employs 7,000 people in the city, and more than half are engineers and technical staff.

The Google story mirrors the rise and evolution of New York as a genuine tech hub — home to a deep pool of technical talent as well as sales, marketing and business expertise. And Amazon’s decision to put a headquarters in the city, eventually employing more than 25,000 workers, only reinforces that trend.

“This solidifies New York’s importance and significance in tech,” said Fred Wilson, the dean of New York’s venture capital community and co-founder of Union Square Ventures.

Amazon, like most big tech companies, is no stranger to New York. It already has over 2,000 workers in New York, from e-commerce marketers to cloud computing engineers.

Facebook has over 2,000 New York employees, including Yann LeCun, its chief artificial intelligence scientist and a pioneer in the field. Salesforce employs more than 1,000 at its new offices in New York. And tech stalwart IBM chose the city as the headquarters for its Watson artificial intelligence and cloud computing divisions.

The East Coast is more well-rounded. It is about technology, but not just technology for its own sake.

Most technology work in New York has traditionally been in service of other industries. That market, too, is growing briskly as banks, retailers, advertising and consulting firms — major employers in New York — are all getting digital makeovers and hiring. Goldman Sachs, for example, employs 2,000 tech workers in New York, including data analysts, app developers, digital security and blockchain experts. Manuela Veloso, head of the machine-learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, joined JPMorgan Chase this year to lead its AI research team.

The five companies with the most tech-related job listings in New York over the last three months on Indeed.com, the jobs listing site, are Amazon, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.

Measurements of tech sector jobs vary, depending on definitions. But the broad picture is a growing labour market for well-paying jobs. From 2010 to 2017, according to government statistics, tech sector employment grew by 53,000 in the city, or 65 percent, to an estimated 134,700. And the average salary of $147,300 in 2016, the most recent estimate available, was far higher than the citywide average of $89,100 for all private employers.

The Bay Area, to be sure, remains the nation’s high-tech epicenter. New York is growing impressively, but its tech work force, according to most analyses, is less than half and perhaps one-third that of the Bay Area.

New York fairly consistently ranks second behind the Bay Area in attracting venture capital. In the third quarter, for example, investors put $5.9 billion in start-ups in the New York metropolitan area, according to figures compiled by the PwC-CB Insights MoneyTree Report.

But the Bay Area, including San Francisco and Silicon Valley, took in $12.8 billion. Start-ups in the Washington, D.C. region, where Amazon plans to put another large headquarters, received $575 million in the third quarter.

In the past, New York start-ups typically sold out to larger tech companies. That, too, is changing. Mr Wilson, the venture capitalist, pointed to MongoDB, a database supplier, and Etsy, an e-commerce seller, as examples of start-ups that held out and went public in recent years.

MongoDB trades at about $70 a share, compared with its initial price of $24 a share, when it went public in October 2017. Etsy, which went public at $16 a share in 2015, currently trades at about $47 a share.

“New York entrepreneurs, investors and boards are just starting to get the courage to stay independent and grow here,” Mr Wilson said.

New York entrepreneurs, investors and boards are just starting to get the courage to stay independent and grow here.

The rise of New York’s tech sector, businesspeople and technologists agree, owes a debt to former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He pushed initiatives to make the New York economy less dependent on finance and championed tech programs and education — a long-term campaign to upgrade the technical skills of the city’s work force, whose progress enhanced New York’s appeal to Amazon.

After the financial crisis hit in 2008, Mr Bloomberg stepped up those efforts. In 2010, his administration announced an applied sciences competition.

The city solicited proposals from universities and research organizations for a new center of higher education that would focus on technology, innovation and business. The winner, announced in December 2011, was a joint plan by Cornell University and Technion-the Israel Institute of Technology.

The new institution, Cornell Tech, got underway in Manhattan in 2012, and last year moved into three buildings in its first phase of development on Roosevelt Island. There are now 300 graduate students on campus. Over the next two decades, the plan calls for two million square feet of buildings, a student population of 2,000 and hundreds of faculty. Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech, sits on Amazon’s board.

The prospect of new competition served as a prod — and encouragement — to both Columbia University and New York University. Columbia expanded its engineering and computer science programmes, and created the Data Science Institute. NYU absorbed an engineering school, Polytechnic University, which in 2015 became NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.

NYU also took over an old, unused Metropolitan Transportation Authority building in Brooklyn, renovated it and has begun populating it with tech-fuelled research ventures, starting with the Center for Urban Science and Progress.

For technologists who have recently come to New York, part of its appeal is the same thing that explains why its tech sector is often overlooked: New York’s huge and diverse economy, and its culture.

“Everything is tech-driven on the West Coast,” said Jeannette Wing, who left Microsoft Research last year to become the director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “But the East Coast is more well-rounded. It is about technology, but not just technology for its own sake.”

libaba turned in another record-setting Singles Day on Sunday, with consumers snapping up bargains despite China’s slowing economic growth, the trade fight with the US and the diminished presence of Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

The e-commerce behemoth clocked in sales of $US30.8 billion ($42.61bn) in the 24-hour span that began at 12am on Sunday — preceded by a glitzy televised stage show in Shanghai featuring Cirque Du Soleil, Mariah Carey and Australian model Miranda Kerr. Alibaba zoomed past the previous year’s record of $US25.3bn by 5.30pm.

A natural showman, Mr Ma is usually an outsize presence at the gala — but not this year. In September, he said he planned to ­retire next year as executive chairman and hand the reins to chief executive Daniel Zhang.

Mr Ma was present at the event, but did not take his usual star turn on stage. Instead, he ­appeared in a recorded video that showed him competing against Alibaba employees at tasks including delivering meals, taping packages and tying up crabs.

An Alibaba representative said the founder’s participation in the annual gala was “different every year”.

Late on Sunday night, Mr Ma showed up at the media centre’s area showcasing Alibaba’s business units and stopped several times to admire the technology on view, including a robotic arm that mixed and poured a cocktail. “Not bad,” he said in front of a crush of Alibaba employees. Sunday was seen as a test for Mr Zhang, who said at a media briefing late on Sunday that he saw helping upgrade and digitise brick-and-mortar stores to be crucial to expanding Singles Day and the company in the future.

“People always ask, ‘Daniel, what is the ceiling to this?’ ” he said. “But today if we look at traditional online (spending in China), it’s 20 per cent of consumption.”

Expanding Alibaba’s reach further offline would “greatly ­extend the addressable market”, he said.

Singles Day has boomed along with China’s rising middle class, and the day has now become a litmus test for an economy grappling with falling property prices, volatile stockmarkets and a tit-for-tat trade spat.

At the media briefing, executive vice-chairman Joe Tsai ­acknowledged that a trade war might negatively affect China’s economy in the short term. But a wave of increasingly affluent consumers was likely to lift both the country and the company, he said.

“There are 300 million (in China’s) middle class. In the next 10, 15 years, that number will double to 600 million,” Mr Tsai said. “That number is not going to stop, trade war or no trade war.”

Faced with short-term economic uncertainty, however, Alibaba cut its full-year forecast earlier this month by as much as 6 per cent as growth slowed in categories such as consumer electronics. For now, the company has experienced slower growth in big-ticket items such as washing machines and fridges tied to a slowdown in the property market, Mr Tsai said. Overall, online retail sales growth in China slowed to 24 per cent in the third quarter, down from 36 per cent in the previous quarter, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Despite such pressures, Alibaba still managed to top last year’s record as it focused on new areas of growth, including global markets, food delivery and brick-and-mortar stores.

For the first time, Lazada Group, Alibaba’s e-commerce arm based in Singapore, rolled out Singles Day sales in six Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam and Thailand.

Singles Day was originally conceived as a holiday for China’s young people to celebrate their solitary state. Its name in Chinese — “Single Sticks Holiday” — is derived from its date on November 11, or 11/11.