China Singles Day kicks off officially today with many retailers slashing prices, offering promotions for the big shopping day, but not for many. This has been a weeks-long affair. That's as China, of course, grapples with weak economic data and flailing domestic demand. We want to go out to China. Jacob Cook is with us, PC marketing and Technology CEO, and it has been weeks long in the making. What of today, Jacob? How much spending is done on 1111? Well, probably about 25 to 30% is actually down on the day now. The festival is getting longer and longer every year. We started back in October this year, but overall, pretty optimistic. We just closed out about 10 minutes ago here. We're now the 12th in China. But overall, we're actually predicting a little bit stronger growth we had year over year this year than last year. So it's looking pretty optimistic so far.

And what are they buying? Well, a lot of different things now. Actually, you know, there's a lot about the hobbies and outdoor consumption. You know, Pat had a really good shopping festival as well. Exercise, outdoor vitamins, personal care, cosmetics, these types of things. Definitely what we've kind of summarized this trend is to be more around the Lululemon and a little bit less than Louis Vuitton, and that's kind of just a general emergence of that new consumer that's come out of China. From a global audience, I'm Bloomberg Technology. A lot of people watching this won't have experience, particularly of Alibaba, but also JD Dot.coms, consumer-facing businesses. What's the experience like in China? Is it kind of something akin to an Amazon Prime Day window in the United States? How do people rush to do their shopping? Well, I think there's two things. One, there's probably people that have had their eye on certain

items for the year. Maybe it's a new set of golf clubs or sporting equipment. And then there's also the people that stock up. Perhaps it really has a lot to do that. And the pet category with people stocking up for months and months in advance. You're going to see basically every add on elevators and TVs, etc., promoting the shopping festival for about a month. And combine this with the 618 shopping festival in June. A lot of brands are expected to do about 50% of their online sales during these two periods combined. So it's obviously very substantial. Jacob, You help global brands make inroads into China, but also Japan, South Korea, other Asian markets. What are they telling you about nervousness around continuing to focus in on China at this moment, given the economic concerns, given a new administration that's going to come in the US? Yeah, certainly our brand has been asking for diversification throughout the region and we operate, as you said,

all throughout Asia. So that's Korea, Southeast Asia. We are, though, taking a lot of learnings from here. So if you look at a lot of the dominant platforms, whether it's Coupang in Korea or Lazada and Shopee in Southeast Asia, a lot of them are either owned by Chinese, heavily invested by Chinese, or they have some major operations that have come out of China. So as we're diversifying, you know, China still being about two-thirds of all e-commerce GMV when you add up that region. But we do see a lot of the learnings coming from China being able to be applied, especially in the livestreaming, the influencer marketing, and these types of things that are becoming more and more popular, especially when we see the rise of TikTok sales throughout Asia too as well.

China's Singles' Day Outlook

Welcome to the Bloomberg Technology YouTube channel. Subscribe for original series and mini-docs on game-changing technologies, profiles on innovators, live conversations with experts, and breaking technology news & analysis from Bloomberg TV.