Wild Singles Day can't lift Alibaba stock

Despite roaring Singles Day sales of more than $14 billion on Wednesday, Alibaba's stock fell by 2 percent.

The e-commerce giant said it took in $5 billion within the first 90 minutes of the online shopping spree and $10 billion in the first 14 hours.

The total value of goods purchased during the company's 11/11 Shopping Festival was 91.2 billion yuan ($14.33 billion).

But the stock couldn't keep pace.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd shares opened at $82.28 before falling to an intraday low of $78.12 a few minutes after the open. The stock closed at $79.85, down $1.58 or 1.94 percent from Tuesday.

Singles Day exceeded an estimate by market research firm IDC, which had predicted sales of 87 billion yuan ($13.7 billion).

The top-selling items on Alibaba's platform included baby-related and nutritional products, Nike sneakers and Levi's jeans, the company told Bloomberg News.

Sales were up more than 50 percent over last year, with nearly 68 percent of the orders placed through mobile devices.

Alibaba said consumers bought $157 million in goods in the first three minutes of last year's event, with sales reaching $9.3 billion during the 24-hour spending spree.

Data from Forrester Research showed that in 2014, $2 billion in transactions were made in the first hour last year, and 43 percent of all sales were made through mobile phones.

Singles Day, which started in the 1990s but was commercialized by Alibaba in 2009, is the world's biggest online retail-sales day, outpacing the combined totals from Black Friday in the US (the day after Thanksgiving) and Cyber Monday (four days after Thanksgiving), according to data from research firm eMarketer.

Xiafeng Wang, a senior analyst for Forrester Research in Singapore, told China Daily that sales for this year's event were expected to rise despite China's slowing economy. Wang said that more businesses were participating and there were more promotions. Retailers also provided options such as cross-border shopping.

Alibaba said this year's event featured more than 6 million products from nearly 40,000 merchants and 30,000 brands in 25 countries (a group that included the United States, China, Japan and South Korea, among others). Retailers from 180,000 brick-and-mortar stores across 330 cities in China also participated.

Before Wednesday, China Post had estimated that 760 million packages would be generated by Singles Day, an increase of 40.7 percent from last year's 540 million parcels.