Alibaba Just Made $1 Billion in 5 Minutes

Singles’ Day, celebrating the joys of — you guessed it — being single, originated in 1993 when college students thought of antagonizing Valentine’s Day.

What started in the confines of Nanjing University eventually spread to the Chinese society. Later on, it became one of the world’s biggest online shopping days, rivaling the likes of America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

This year, the special day brought in 6.81 billion yuan ($1 billion) in the early hours on Friday for Alibaba in just a matter of five minutes. Investors had been keeping an eye at the date to see if the company surpasses its 2015 record, and it managed to do so.

As per The Telegraph, Alibaba earned over 5 billion Yuan ($735,234,000.00) in five minutes and 45 seconds last year. In total, the 24-hour extravaganza raked 91.2 billion Yuan ($14.3 billion).

According to Bloomberg, about 11,000 brands are selling their products on the shopping holiday. Alibaba set up a virtual reality service to let Chinese customers purchase from Macy’s in New York and Tokyo’s Otaku Mode. Live-streaming, which undoubtedly took over the country, was also added across the company’s sites.

Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang expressed why all this is happening: