China's largest B2B trading platform, 1688.com, has broken the global record for the volume of transactions in one day.
Alibaba are on the up Image: CIW |
The website, which hosts the B2B trading site Alibaba.com, announced that on September 4th the total amount of online transactions reached 4.2bn yuan ($679m) - a record in the global B2B market.
According to a statement released by the company, 230,000 of the site's sellers made a total of 2.52 million transactions in just twenty-four hours.
Meanwhile, China's H1 online retail turnover rocketed 70% year-on-year to 880bn yuan ($143bn according to the Ministry of Commerce. The Ministry is also planning an ambitious cross-border trading scheme to come into effect this year aimed at boosting online retail further.
Alibaba, China's e-commerce behemoth, is mulling an IPO that could rival that of Facebook.com in size. The company's founder and Chairman Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou, will float the company in either Shanghai or New York. According to Yahoo!, which owns roughly a quarter of the company, Alibaba.com raised $1.38bn in revenues last year.