Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group on Monday kicked off its ‘global shopping festival’ for the year, with pre-sales already underway. The festival, called ‘Singles’ day’ will take place on November 11 (11.11), for its 11th year in running.

The biggest attraction of the festival is the wide variety of brands it offers on one platform, along with deep discounts and regular flash sales. Last year, the single-day shopping fest outstripped most of United States’ major shopping festivals, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, bringing in nearly $40 billion over the span of 24 hours.

In 2019, the company expects nearly 500 million shoppers on its websites, from across the world, including China, where consumption needs in low-tier cities has risen over the last two years.

Of the 226 million new mobile monthly active users that joined Alibaba’s online shopping website, Taobao, over the last two years, 70 percent were from lower-tier areas, as of June 2019, the company says.

“The success of our focus on less-developed markets in China is reflected in our new customer acquisition growth,” said Chris Tung, the company’s chief marketing officer.

To meet consumer demand from lower-tier areas, Alibaba has been helping factories in China become more technologically savvy by giving them access to analytics tools, IoT capabilities, and marketing tools, to make their manufacturing processes efficient and meet demands of consumers from the lower-tier areas.

U.S.-China Trade War

Investors have raised concerns over Alibaba’s sales to the U.S. against the backdrop of the ongoing trade war where the U.S. has imposed more than $300 billion in import-related tariffs on consumer goods from China. Chinese merchants on Amazon have already outlined the effect of the trade war on their sales, and asked for some pressure-relief, although Amazon itself has not publicly commented on the trade-war issue.

However, in 2018, when trade war concerns were still tempering market sentiment, Alibaba posted record sales numbers.