What does Alibaba’s Cainiao Singles Day billion deliveries look like?

Chinese businesses are facing a massive problem in the aftermath of the huge success with Alibaba’s Cainiao Singles Day deliveries starting to arrive. Many Chinese consumers have packages delivered to them at work and office blocks in cities across China are struggling to cope with the deluge of Alibaba Singles Day purchases arriving for office workers.

With a massive one billion parcels to deliver, Alibaba’s Cainiao Smart Logistics Network broke its own delivery-speed record for the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, shaving nearly five hours from the time required to deliver the first 100 million packages in 2017.

The chart above shows the growth in the number of packages sold on Singles Day each year and, from 2013 when then 100 million package sales volume was reached, how many days it took to delivery the first 100 million parcels. From 9 days in 2009, 100 million Alibaba’s Cainiao Singles Day packages were delivered in just 2.6 days in 2018.

Consumers in over 251 cities in China received their 11.11 overseas orders within same-day or next-day, largely due to Cainiao’s upgraded logistics. Cainiao’s long-term goal is to be delivering all packages inside China within 24 hours and within 72 hours to the rest of the world.

“We handled 152 million parcels during the 11.11 festival in 2013. Today, the industry is now delivering 150 million parcels every single day in China. With this pace of change, we believe that the 1 billion parcels handled in this year’s 11.11 will become the daily average within the next decade”
– Wan Lin, President, Cainiao

Shipping the parcels is just one end of the delivery problem however, the other side of the coin is receiving parcels and the volumes are so high that they are literally piling up outside office blocks waiting to be claimed by office workers. It’s a hard problem to put into words, but the video posted on LinkedIn by George Godula puts the problem into sharp perspective. Bear in mind, that with 100 million parcels delivered there’s still another 900 million plus packages yet to arrive.