After last year’s $6 billion shopfest, how big will China’s Single’s Day shopping spree be this year?

We’re less than a week away from China’s insane 24-hour online shopfest on November 11. It’s the country’s equivalent of Cyber Monday, though it’s rather confusingly called Single’s Day ⁽¹⁾. Last year saw US$5.7 billion spent on Alibaba’s two main ecommerce sites in that one day as people rushed to get discounts, and rival JD saw US$1.6 billion spent.

So how big could China’s Single’s Day shopping bonanza be this year? Focusing just on Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, it’s worth noting the hockey stick growth that the online event has seen since it started in 2009. That first year, a mere RMB 50 million was spent in the 24-hour period, which was US$8 million at that day’s exchange rate. But that’s because only 27 brands took part in offering discounts. By the next year, Single’s Day grew to RMB 936 million (US$150 million at that time), and then exploded to RMB 5.2 billion (US$832 million) in 2011.

By 2012, the sales day hit the multiple billions with RMB 19.1 billion (US$3.1 billion) in 24 hours. That was the first time that China’s ecommerce spendapalooza was bigger than America’s Cyber Monday – US netizens spent a total of $1.46 billion online in one day in late November 2012.

Here’s a chart showing that crazy growth (all US$ figures are from the day of the event):

So, how big could Single’s Day be this year? It’s tough to predict because China’s ecommerce spending as a whole is slowing as it saturates throughout the nation’s 600 million-plus web users. But if we look at the growth in China’s one-day shopfest in isolation and apply a polynomial trend line to our chart, it looks like China’s shoppers are course to spend close to US$10 billion in one day on Alibaba’s two estores.

For a sense of scale, Alibaba yesterday revealed its Q3 earnings report, showing that consumer spending on Tmall and Taobao (what it calls gross merchandise volume, or GMV) reached US$90.53 billion for the quarter from July to September. That means the normal daily spend on those sites is an average of US$984 million. So 2014’s Singles Day could see expenditure 10 times higher than normal.

In probably related news, Alibaba founder Jack Ma is China’s richest man.

See: These numbers from Asia’s half-trillion dollar ecommerce market will blow your mind – INFOGRAPHIC