AFP

China’s Singles Day shopping bonanza entered its final stretch Friday, with all eyes on whether sales can top a record one trillion yuan ($140 billion) despite the country’s struggling economy.

Conceived by technology giant Alibaba, the informal holiday’s title riffs on a tongue-in-cheek celebration of singlehood inspired by the four ones — “11/11” — that denote its date of November 11.

It has grown to encompass much of China’s retail sector — including traditional brick-and-mortar stores, second-hand sales platforms and even rival shopping giant JD.com — with merchants offering varying levels of discounts starting in late October.

The combined gross value of products sold by Alibaba and JD.com this year “may surpass a trillion yuan,” Xiaofeng Wang, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said in a note — up from the total of 965 billion yuan raked in at last year’s event.

Once a festival of frenzied consumption led by Alibaba’s effervescent founder Jack Ma, Singles Day has been more muted in recent years as Beijing cracks down on online platforms.

Last year’s holiday was virtually ignored by state-controlled news outlets with a host of other events competing for shoppers’ wallets.

Beijing resident Liu Yingxue said the Single’s Day atmosphere was “not as enthusiastic” as in previous years.

“Platforms like (Alibaba’s) Taobao and JD.com used to have more ads and promotions,” she told AFP. 

“And they don’t give so many discounts these days.”

– Economic strain –

The mood has been dampened further this year as Beijing persists with a zero-Covid strategy that has hammered business confidence and chipped away at consumer demand.

The holiday, conceived in 2009, has previously lured throngs of Chinese influencers alongside Western celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift, drawing heavy coverage in both domestic and international media.

This time around, a series of scandals and a campaign against tax evasion have lowered expectations of celebrity endorsements, with influential Chinese live-streamer Viya disappearing from social media late last year in the wake of a tax probe.

Alibaba said last week the event could “make a big difference” for retailers struggling with supply-chain disruptions and inflation this year, including a slew of foreign brands.

Businesses and consumers alike have been laid low by China’s stringent Covid prevention policies, which see officials wield snap lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines in response to a handful of cases.

Beijing resident Li Xiaofeng said the “state of the whole economy” was likely putting platforms and merchants under more pressure, “so they are offering fewer discounts”.

“I think it’s because of Covid,” said Lin Xiangru, another denizen of China’s capital. 

“People have less guaranteed income than before, so they don’t want to spend money on desired products at such a specific moment.”

China is the last major economy wedded to a strategy of extinguishing new outbreaks as they occur.

State media reported Thursday that top leaders had again vowed to stick “unswervingly” to the policy.

Britain’s economy shrank in the third quarter, official data showed Friday, likely confirming it is already in a recession forecast to last some time.

Output contracted 0.2 percent in the July-September period, following a modest rise in the second quarter, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a statement. 

The Bank of England last week said the UK economy was set to also contract in the current final quarter, meaning the economy was in a recession.

The BoE also warned that Britain’s economy could remain in recession until the middle of 2024.

Friday’s data comes ahead of a fresh budget announcement from the government of new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday as he looks to bring much needed political and economic stability to the UK.

– ‘Tough road ahead’ –

Following Friday’s data, finance minister Jeremy Hunt said he was “under no illusion that there is a tough road ahead — one which will require extremely difficult decisions to restore confidence and economic stability”.

Preparing the country for tax hikes and spending cuts in next week’s budget, he added that the Conservative government needed to “balance the books and get debt falling”. 

“There is no other way,” he said, if Britain was to “achieve long-term sustainable growth”.

As well as recession, Britain is facing a cost-of-living crisis with UK inflation at a four-decade high above 10 percent.

The country faces a winter of strike action as workers in the public and private sectors demand pay increases to match inflation and shortfalls to wage rises seen in recent years.

“The sharp rise in energy and other consumer prices has contributed to a squeeze on household finances, which is expected to have pushed the UK economy into a recession from the third quarter of this year,” Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG UK, said following Friday’s data.

The third-quarter contraction was in part owing to a national public holiday to mark the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, which resulted in the closure of a large number of businesses, the ONS said.

The funeral in September took place during the short-lived leadership of former prime minister Liz Truss.

Hitting out over her time in office, her former finance minister on Thursday said he had warned Truss to “slow down” on tax cuts that triggered economic turmoil and caused her downfall.

Kwasi Kwarteng, appointed chancellor of the exchequer after Truss succeeded Boris Johnson, made a series of unfunded tax cut announcements in late September.

Kwarteng’s budget panicked the markets, sent the pound to an all-time low against the dollar and triggered emergency buying of UK government bonds by the BoE.

Truss was forced to resign in mid-October after less than 50 days in office — becoming the shortest-serving prime minister in Britain’s history. 

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Japan’s SoftBank Group on Friday posted a net profit in the second quarter, partly thanks to gains from its recent reduction of its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

The investment behemoth has made huge bets to find and grow new tech ventures around the world — making its earnings vulnerable to fickle market forces, and leading to dizzying highs and lows in recent years.

China’s crackdown on its tech sector has also hit SoftBank hard, because the Japanese group has long been a major shareholder in Alibaba and others such as ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing.

In August, SoftBank announced it would sell down some of its shares in Alibaba, reducing its stake in the Chinese tech giant to around 15 percent from 24 percent.

This helped boost SoftBank’s earnings in the second quarter for a net profit of 3.03 trillion yen ($21.4 billion).

“The company’s voting ownership in Alibaba fell below 20 percent, and Alibaba was therefore excluded from the associates of the company,” SoftBank Group noted in a statement.

Over the first half of this financial year, however, it suffered a net loss of 129 billion yen, brought down by its record net loss in the first quarter.

SoftBank’s net loss in April to June was partly due to a global tech share rout triggered by interest-rate hikes by the US Fed and other central banks to tackle inflation.

These market losses caused painful drops in SoftBank’s investments in unicorn ventures, such as US food delivery app DoorDash and South Korean e-commerce brand Coupang, a broad trend that continued in the second quarter, SoftBank said.

CEO Masayoshi Son is known for his unconventional and often sanguine presentations at earnings announcements to highlight his vision and philosophy behind his decisions, such as investing generously in risky ventures like the troubled WeWork.

But in a change of tack for the company, Son will let his deputies do most of the talking at a post-results press conference later on Friday.

In 2021-22, SoftBank logged a record full-year net loss — having recorded Japan’s biggest-ever annual net profit the previous financial year.

To illustrate the financial woes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Son once displayed a drawing of horses trotting toward a “Valley of Coronavirus”, some staying at its bottom while others grew wings and horns to soar to the heavens as unicorns.

And at his last earnings announcement in August, Son showed a painting of a grimacing samurai warlord who suffered a major battlefield setback as he discussed deep losses that plagued his company.

Inadequate privacy safeguards and the stockpiling of sensitive customer information have made Australia a lucrative target in the eyes of foreign hackers, cybersecurity experts told AFP following a series of major data breaches.

Medibank, Australia’s largest private health insurer, recently confirmed that hackers had accessed the data of 9.7 million current and former customers, including medical records related to drug abuse and pregnancy terminations. 

Telecom company Optus fell prey to a data breach of similar scale in late September, during which the personal details of up to 9.8 million people were accessed. 

Both incidents sit comfortably among the largest data breaches in Australian history. 

Australian National University cybersecurity expert Thomas Haines said many companies had been hoarding personal data that they should not have been hanging on to. 

“There was a famous line for a while: Data is the new oil,” he told AFP. 

“If data is the new oil, then we’re living the era of the weekly oil spill.” 

Haines contrasted Australia’s approach with that of the European Union, which in 2018 adopted sweeping privacy reforms limiting how organisations collect, use and store personal data.

“There have got to be incentives in place to stop companies hoarding data they don’t need, or to penalise those companies for big leaks. Europe has done this,” he said.

“At the moment the business incentives are basically along the lines of: Let’s just keep a whole bunch of data.”

Haines said Medibank appeared to be an exception, in that most of the sensitive information within its databases had been stored for good reason. 

– Hacking ‘for profit’ – 

Australia’s comparatively weak safeguards against identity theft meant it was also easier to exploit stolen personal information, Haines said. 

“All they need to know is your passport, your driver’s licence and some other things — and then I can start taking out loans in your name.”

Haines said European countries such as Norway had much more stringent requirements involving face-to-face contact.

Dennis Desmond, a former FBI agent and US Defense Intelligence Agency officer, said most hackers were searching for particular types of data. 

“For-profit hackers are going after healthcare data, they’re going after identity data and credentials to access systems,” he told AFP.

“There is a profit motivation there, otherwise they wouldn’t be risking jail and prosecution.”

The Medibank hackers this week started leaking stolen data to a dark web forum, after the company refused to pay a US$9.7 million (Aus$15 million) ransom.

The Optus breach led to the theft of customers’ names, birth dates, and passport numbers.

– Russia blamed –

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw on Friday blamed the Medibank cyberattack on a team of hackers based in Russia.

“We believe those responsible for the breach are in Russia,” he told reporters.

“Our intelligence points to a  group of loosely affiliated cyber criminals who are likely responsible for past significant breaches in countries across the world.”

Medibank data leaked to the dark web so far has included hundreds of potentially-compromising medical records related to drug addiction, alcohol abuse and sexually-transmitted infections. 

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil conceded on Friday the country’s cyber defences had not always been up to scratch. 

University of Sydney data researcher Jane Andrew said one major flaw was that Australian companies were not always obliged to report data breaches. 

“There are heaps of data breaches happening all the time that we don’t hear anything about,” she told AFP. 

“Companies have been gathering data because it’s seen to be valuable, without fully understanding the potential risks.” 

China announced the relaxation of some of its hardline Covid-19 restrictions on Friday, after authorities had vowed to stick to a zero-tolerance virus approach despite mounting economic damage.

The country is the last major economy welded to a strategy of stamping out virus flare-ups as they occur, through a combination of snap lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines.

Top leaders had pledged to stick “unswervingly” to the policy, which has forced business closures, roiled international supply chains and weighed heavily on growth.

But a notice from the country’s disease control agency on Friday said the Politburo Standing Committee — the apex of power in China — met Thursday to rubberstamp limited relaxations.

According to the notice, quarantines for inbound travellers will be cut from 10 days to eight, consisting of five days in a state isolation centre and three days at home.

Inbound arrivals will still be required to undergo six nucleic acid tests and will not be allowed to freely set foot outside during those eight days, the notice says.

It adds that travellers will only be required to show one negative Covid test within 48 hours of boarding flights to China, a reduction from the current two tests.

– Relaxing strict policies –

The new rules single out “important business personnel” and “sports groups” as examples of privileged groups permitted to skip quarantine as long as they remain in a virus-secure “closed loop” for the duration of their stays.

It added that a so-called “circuit breaker” mechanism on inbound flights would be abolished, bringing an end to a policy that saw the snap closures of flight routes if a certain proportion of passengers tested positive for the virus.

In further signs of easing, the notice did away with the requirement to identify and isolate “secondary close contacts” — those who may have come into contact with people who recently passed near infected people.

A domestic virus risk system has been reduced from three tiers to two, with areas to be labelled as either “high-risk” and subject to curbs, or “low-risk” with minimal restrictions.

People travelling from high- to low-risk areas will be required to undergo seven days of isolation at home, instead of staying in centralised facilities.

Places will be defined as “low-risk” if they record zero new infections for five successive days.

Workers in environments where exposure to the virus is higher — such as cabin crews, airport staff and quarantine hotel personnel — will undergo shortened quarantines, the notice said.

On Thursday, Chinese state media reported top leaders as saying they would not waver from the zero-Covid policy, echoing a vow last week to “unswervingly” stick to the strategy.