Double 11 Ended With Sales Growth of 4.8 Percent — and the First AI Tokens Sold as a Shopping-Festival Item

China's Double 11 shopping festival has ended with about 1.78 trillion yuan in sales, up 4.8 percent on the year — a figure that has been read as the end of the festival's growth engine rather than a blip. Last year, the same festival grew 14.2 percent.

The reading of the number matters more than the number itself. Baidu's trending board carried the headline "the era of Double 11 is over": the festival's growth has come from the platforms' ability to create additional demand, and the platforms have been unable to create additional demand for years. The story is the story of a consumer economy that has been slowing — the festival's growth has been built on the idea that the platforms' discounts can create additional demand, and the platforms have not been able to make that argument.

The slowdown is not the whole story. One analysis of the festival's data noted that the growth came from the instant-delivery platforms, which grew 33 percent — the fastest-growing segment of the festival, and the one that has been growing for the whole year. The festival's growth is being built on delivery, not on discounts, and the delivery platforms are the ones that have been running a subsidy war all year — the one our site has already covered.

The other story is the festival's first AI tokens. The 36Kr report described how the livestreamer Li Jiaqi — whose sale of two trillion tokens our site has already covered — sold a monthly membership card for Alibaba's Qwen AI assistant at 0.01 yuan on November 2, with nearly 100,000 sold in half an hour. The card is a bundle of 20 billion tokens, and the sale was a new kind of scene for the festival: a product that is invisible, untouchable, and yet sold in a livestream room.

The story of the festival's growth is no longer the story of the festival itself: the instant-delivery platforms are the ones that are growing, and the AI tokens are the ones that are new.