Worldwide oil prices dropped roughly two percent on Monday after a comparable fall on Friday, driven by investor disappointment with the Chinese government’s weak economic stimulus plan.
Another bad sign for the Chinese economy was the disappointing “Single’s Day” online shopping holiday, which posted some of its lowest sales numbers since the event began in 2009.
Price Futures Group senior analyst Phil Flynn told Reuters on Monday that the Veterans Day holiday in the United States, and the election of Donald Trump last week, could also be factors in reduced oil prices.
Veterans Day slowed trading for a day, while Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill” may have “taken away some incentive to go long,” according to Flynn.
Traders are also mindful that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is planning to increase production soon, bringing long-term pricing forecasts down. Sources within OPEC+, the grouping that includes Russia, said in late October that they might delay their production increase until worldwide demand grows stronger.
Flynn and other analysts saw the flagging Chinese economy as the major reason for oil slipping. Chinese demand is weakening right now, while Trump’s impact on the world oil markets will not be felt until late next year at the earliest.
The already sluggish Chinese economy slipped into the doldrums last week, when Beijing announced its long-awaited economic stimulus plan. The plan appeared mostly geared toward rescuing municipal governments from their huge debt loads, to the great dismay of investors who wanted big spending on growth initiatives.
This sense of dismay was immediately felt on “Single’s Day,” a holiday originally minted in the 1990s as a day for Chinese youth to explore dating and courtship in a culture that preferred to bring men and women together by arranging marriages for them. November 11 was chosen because the date is written with all ones, or “singles”: 11/11.
In 2008, China’s massive e-commerce company Alibaba hit on the idea of turning the popular holiday into an online shopping festival, encouraging buyers to either splurge on their love interests, or splurge on themselves if they were alone. One of Alibaba’s early slogans for Single’s Day was: “Even if you don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you can at least shop like crazy!”
People did indeed shop like crazy for years afterward, as more e-commerce companies joined in the shopping festival. Turning Singles’ Day into China’s answer to Black Friday became a point of pride for many shoppers. As with Black Friday, the event expanded, eventually becoming an entire week long – and it is still growing. The first Singles’ Day deals this year were spotted on October 14, over a week earlier than last year.
Making the shopping event longer made it more difficult to judge its success than during its first few years, when Alibaba and its competitors posted astounding one-day sales numbers. The Associated Press (AP) noted on Monday that the overall feeling on Singles’ Day 2024 was disappointment, with many customers sticking to necessities and dismissing the big holiday “sales” as mere gimmicks.
Luxury purchases plummeted this year, while discount items and basic goods sold better. Alibaba and some other large platforms stopped publishing their sales numbers in 2022, suggesting they saw nothing to brag about. Many merchants pulled out of the Singles’ Day extravaganza, feeling the increased sales did not justify sky-high advertising rates.
“People are not interested in spending and are cutting back on big-ticket items. Since October 2022, the weak economy means that everything has been on discount year-round, 11.11 is not going to bring in more discounts than the month before,” China Market Research Group founder and managing director Shaun Rein told the AP.
Alibaba, the originator of Singles’ Day as a shopping event, has evidently decided to shift its resources to offer global free shipping to international buyers instead of spending heavily on shopping holiday promotions.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) said on Monday that market analysts were expecting “solid growth numbers” for Singles’ Day, and would interpret anything less as a sign of low consumer confidence.
Consulting firm VO2 Asia Pacific said it expected fifteen percent growth over Singles’ Day 2023, reaching about $167 billion in sales, but it also warned that Chinese consumers have gotten in the habit of making bulk purchases to hit discount thresholds and then returning much of what they purchased, so the final sales figures could be much lower than whatever companies post on Tuesday.
