Chinese online shoppers spent a record-breaking 25 billion US dollars this Singles' Day, a staggering 40% more than last year. According to Alibaba, China's leading ecommerce site, 1 billion US dollars was spent in just the first 2 minutes after midnight, when the sale began. Singles' Day is China's biggest ecommerce sales day and is celebrated on the 11th of November as a kind of anti-Valentine's Day. This year's figures mean that it is now around four times bigger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the biggest ecommerce days in the West. In an apparently successful bid to boost excitement for the event, Alibaba brought in a raft of celebrities to perform at a televised event in the hours leading up to Singles' Day, including Pharrell Williams, Nicole Kidman and Maria Sharapova.
