SHANGHAI : The focus of China's Singles' Day shopping festival should shift from a"traffic and sales war" to one of science and technology, a state-backed newspaper said on Friday, describing the"worship of turnover" as incompatible with China's new development path.
The newspaper said the event had achieved many years of record breaking sales, but had also given rise to practices such as spam text messaging of users, unfair competition and merchants faking discounts. The model had become one in which it was hard to achieve"breakthrough innovations", the paper said.
"The 'worship of turnover' is not only unsustainable in terms of digital growth but is also inextricably linked to chaos," the newspaper said. "I hope that one day, China's Internet giants will no longer focus on the business of mom-and-pop shops, but will be able to walk towards space in their own private rocket," the article's writer said, pointing to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' and Tesla founder Elon Musk's rocket projects as examples.Alibaba turned China’s informal Singles’ Day into a shopping event in 2009 and built it into the world’s biggest online sales fest, dwarfing Cyber Monday in the United States.