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Here Comes the World's Biggest Shopping Spree -- Again (bloomberg.com)
A reader shares a report: On Nov. 11, China celebrates Singles Day, a holiday dedicated to the nation's unattached. It's also the world's largest shopping festival -- and a bonanza for internet giant Alibaba Group. Up to 500 million consumers will visit sites run by the company searching for discounts on items including Bordeaux wine, UGG boots, SUVs, and high-end Japanese toilets. Citigroup estimates that Alibaba's sales during this year's event could reach 158 billion yuan ($23.8 billion). For Alibaba, Singles Day will also be a demonstration of how far its cloud business has come in eight years. At the peak of activity, Alibaba's servers may be tasked with processing 175,000 transactions a second from its own sites. "It's the day when the largest amount of computing power is needed in China," says He Yunfei, a senior product manager for Alibaba Cloud. [...] Alibaba dominates the Chinese cloud -- in part because local regulators won't issue data center operating licenses to foreign companies, curtailing the China ambitions of Amazon.com and Microsoft, the No. 1 and No. 2 cloud providers globally.
There has been speculation over whether Alibaba Group will eventually buy Amazon or Ebay. It's vastly larger than Amazon and commands a larger share of the online shopping market, so it has the muscle to snap up smaller outlets like those 2 if it wants to expand and reduce its competition. The group has been acquiring other online brokers over time, so it's not without potentiality.
Singles Day is certainly the largest shopping day and has been for some while, but Alibaba Group is huge anyway, with or without Singles Day. In a sense Alibaba Group already powers Amazon and Ebay both. Much of the sellers on those outlets simply buy from Alibaba and sell at a small markup on Amazon or Ebay. There's little reason at end of day to support a middleman skimming off the margins.