Dec 3, 2012
Translated by Pang Lei

Over the first 11 months of this year, the value of trade conducted on Taobao Marketplace and Tmall, the two flagship online retail platforms owned by the Alibaba Group, exceeded a total of 1 trillion yuan.

Alibaba announced this afternoon that as of 9.50am last Friday, the total value of transactions conducted on Taobao Marketplace (淘寶) and Tmall (天貓) this year, had exceeded 1 trillion yuan or roughly $160 billion.

Taobao Mall or Tmall, Alibaba's Business to Consumer platform, was hived off from Taobao in June 2011. The company estimates that 200 billion yuan worth of sales will be conducted via this platform in 2012.

Alibaba also said that sales in third- and fourth-tier cities were growing faster than in first and second-tier cities.

To put that one trillion yuan figure in perspective, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2011 China's annual retail consumption totaled 19.4 trillion yuan.

The value of Alibaba sales in 2012 is about 5 percent of that figure and just short of total retail consumption figures in Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang for that year.

Links and Sources
Sina: 阿里零售交易額超1萬億 馬云轉變淘寶考核目標
Securities Times Online: 阿里巴巴集團網絡零售交易額突破1萬億