How Alibaba's Singles Day Growth Compares To Amazon's Prime Day

$74.1 billion. That's the gross merchandise volume earned by Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) alone during the 2020 Singles Day holiday. 

The Chinese online shopping event, which takes place every Nov. 11, generates sales numbers that are staggering in scale.

Alibaba's haul is more than seven times larger than the estimated GMV earned by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) during its Prime Day holiday. 

But which shopping holiday has grown faster over the last five years? The answer —perhaps surprisingly — is not the Chinese one. 

Prime Day Grows Much Faster Than Singles Day: Alibaba's $74.1 billion in Singles Day 2020 sales certainly represents an impressive growth rate from its GMV of $17.7 billion during Singles Day 2016. In fact, it represents a compound annual growth rate of 33.16% per year.

But according to Digital Commerce 360 estimates, Prime Day 2020 brought in $10.4 billion for Amazon — which, although smaller, represents a 46.91% CAGR from Amazon's haul of $1.52 billion from Prime Day 2016.

If we look at growth over the last year, we can see that the growth of Alibaba's Singles Day sales has quickened relative to Amazon's Prime Day sales; the former grew 92.97% in the last year, while the latter only grew 45.25%.

But this recent growth catch-up is in large part attributable to Alibaba's extension of the holiday into a 12-day period running from Nov. 1 to Nov. 12, something Amazon has not done with Prime Day.

Why It Matters: This data challenges the narrative that Alibaba is growing faster than Amazon as a retailer — especially when considered along with the two companies' market shares in their respective countries.

According to eMarketer data, Alibaba accounted for 55.9% of all online retail sales in China in 2019, while Amazon accounted for 37.3% of online retail sales in the U.S. that year.

Amazon has far more market share still left to capture than Alibaba.

This market share data, combined with the Prime Day and Singles Day growth data, paints a picture of an Alibaba that will need to either boost its e-commerce growth to stay competitive with Amazon in the coming years, or a company that will need to focus on other revenue sources, like its embattled financial services subsidiary Ant Group.

Photo courtesy of Amazon.