- Single's Day Stats for Alibaba: GMV US$9.3 billion (up 60% Y/Y from last year’s full-day tally of US$5.8 billion). Mobile accounted for 42.6% of GMV (up from 21% last year). Orders: 278.5 million. Top brands: Xiaomi in top spot (Xiaomi sold 720K smartphones in 10 hours), Huawei second, and Haier third. Japan’s Uniqlo was next up in fourth place. Discounts were steep: Merchants were pressured to discount by at least 50%, or to the lowest point in the last 60 days, else face steep drops in listings rank.
- Caveat: GMV may have been (heavily) inflated by a 'Pre-Sales Initiative' this year: Alibaba is employing what it calls a "pre-sale initiative", under which merchants advertise products at their discounted Singles' Day price from as early as Oct. 15. Tmall lets customers put down a deposit for the order but only allows merchants to process the full payment and ship the products on Nov. 11. The company said it had used such a scheme since 2012, since it helps merchants plan the logistics of shipping such large volumes of goods. Merchants said this year it was used much more widely, and was aimed at boosting Alibaba's figures. "This is a way they can actually count that volume all transacted in one day," said one online store manager who asked not to be named in case it damaged his business. "They've never done a company-wide policy like this." Merchants said Alibaba ensures discounts are genuine by having vendors discount their products from their lowest price within the 60 days before and after Singles' Day.
- Lenovo's results were disappointing (Q2 rev: $10.5B, net income $262M), and company said hypergrowth in China smartphone sales is ending: Lenovo’s sales in the quarter were $10.5 billion, compared with the $11.3 billion average of 16 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Second-quarter net income rose 19 percent to $262.1 million, beating the $259.8 million average of 12 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg, as Yang took advantage of Lenovo’s expanding scale to boost profit at more than twice the pace of sales Lenovo fell to third in China, trailing Xiaomi and Samsung, according to researcher Canalys. Smartphone sales in China are projected to hit 426 million units this year, compared with about 214 million two years ago, according to a forecast from International Data Corp. Lenovo Group Ltd. (992) said the era of “hypergrowth” is over in China’s smartphone market after the company reported its slowest sales growth in six quarters. Shares fell to their lowest since June 24 on an intraday basis after Lenovo’s revenue rose 7.2 percent in the three months ended September, the smallest increase since March 2013 and missing analysts’ estimates.
- Amazon's AWS business is slowing, facing commoditization and increasing competition from Microsoft and Google:Sales growth at AWS has been declining. AWS is categorized in Amazon’s financial statements in “North America, Other.” That grouping brought in $1.34 billion in the third quarter, up from $960 million a year ago. Yet sales growth fell to 39 percent from a year earlier, down from 57 percent a year before. The cloud industry has become increasingly competitive this year, with Google Inc. and Microsoft slashing costs of their offerings and boosting cloud products. Earlier this month, Google said it was reducing the price of some cloud features -- including storage and networking options -- by 23 percent to 79 percent. Microsoft has also trimmed prices this year and last month said it was increasing cloud services with packages of hardware and software. “Commodification is kind of washing at the foundations of what they do,” said Carl Brooks, an analyst with 451 Group. Amazon remains the dominant cloud provider, with a 27 percent share of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services, according to a report last month from Synergy Research Group Inc. Microsoft has around 10 percent, while International Business Machines Corp. has 7 percent.
- Going cheap rates for website visits in China show why traffic figures from Chinese sites might be unreliable: : A screenshot from a Chinese website that’s selling web traffic: The cheapest option, visits from 1,000 unique IPs per day, will run you just RMB 2.46 (US$0.40) a day. 8,000 visits a day costs just RMB 19.68 (US$3.22). The site in question, which we won’t link to as we don’t wish to contribute to the site’s business, is something that Tech in Asia found easily by searching Baidu, and it claims that it can even help webmasters increase their Alexa ranking.
