Alibaba smashes records in Singles Day sale, breaks $5b in 90 mins

UPDATE 2: As of 7:45 am China time, Alibaba reports it has done more than US$6.5 billion in sales, putting the company on pace to potentially break last year’s full-day sales record before noon. The original story follows:

Jack Ma is looking particularly happy this evening, and he has every reason to be. One hour into Alibaba’s massive Singles Day sales event, the company is already on pace to obliterate previous records.

The company hasn’t released an exact figure for its first hour of sales, but just over 30 minutes into the sale it had already cracked RMB 20 billion (US$3.1 billion). It hit the RMB 30 billion (US$4.7 billion) mark just an hour and 14 minutes into the sale, which means that it may well have cracked US$4 billion in sales in the first hour. That’s a big jump up from the US$2 billion spent last year in the first hour of the sale. The year before that, Alibaba did just over US$1 billion of business in the first hour, which suggests that Singles Day sales growth is actually accelerating.

UPDATE: An Alibaba press release failed to give a precise first-hour total, but noted that by 90 minutes, Alibaba had racked up more than US$5 billion in sales. As of that 90 minute mark, 72 percent of the company’s sales had been processed by Alipay via mobile, making this Alibaba’s most mobile Singles Day by a long shot.

Last year, the company’s full-day sales total ended up being just over US$9 billion. This year, the company is on pace to obliterate that record if sales continue at the expected pace over the next 23 hours.

Needless to say, Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao is already up and running in response to the sales deluge. In fact, by the end of the first hour, the company had already processed well over 100 million orders, and the first order has already been delivered: