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I'm also having a hard time reconciling this with Alibaba's just-reported quarterly revenue of $12.8B in 2017Q4: http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf

Singles' day was 11/11 so it should be in there, no?

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I wonder if that's because Alibaba is mostly a marketplace and they sold $25B worth of stuff with a margin of 5-10% on it, meaning they'd only have generated ~1-5B for themselves on that day.

Alibaba has a different business model than Amazon, more similar to eBay actually. Alibaba takes a small cut on sales from third parties who do all the work. That small cut is what gets reported as revenue, despite sales figures of many times that.

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