China’s “618” shopping festival, one of the country’s two major annual sales extravaganzas, ended this past weekend, seeing only a lukewarm response amidst a broader trend of sluggish retail consumption.
Between May 31 and June 18, JD.com, one of China’s biggest e-commerce platforms, reported total sales of 379.3 billion yuan ($56.6 billion). While the figure represents a 10.3% increase over sales during the same period last year, the growth is much lower than the 28% year-on-year increase in 2021 and 33.6% in 2020. Overall, this year’s 618 sales growth is the slowest ever for JD, Reuters reported.
JD’s two major rivals e-commerce platforms, run by Alibaba and Pinduoduo, usually don’t publish sales figures for the festival. Instead, Alibaba only said in a statement that it achieved “positive year-on-year” gross merchandise volume growth in a “challenging environment.”
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