Black Friday shoppers spent a record US$9.8 billion online in the US, Adobe Analytics reported, offering a positive sign for retailers facing lackluster sales forecasts for the holiday season.
Demand for electronics, smartwatches, TVs and audio equipment helped boost the day’s online sales by 7.5 percent compared with last year. Consumers extended their budgets by leaning on buy-now, pay-later options, which climbed by 72 percent from the week before Thanksgiving.
Macy’s Inc CEO Jeff Gennette said that the retailer had a “great day online yesterday during Thanksgiving,” as buyers snapped up luxury items, hostess gifts and home prep.
Photo: Bloomberg
The uptick marks a recovery from last year’s holiday season, when high inflation hit consumers’ pockets and retailers discounted heavily to get rid of bloated inventories. This year, holiday shopping is a bellwether for US consumer resilience as COVID-19 pandemic-era savings dwindle and interest rates remain at a more than 20-year high.
Consumers are “now very price-conscious,” Adobe Digital Insights lead analyst Vivek Pandya said in an interview.
US online sales grew 9 percent year-on-year in a separate Salesforce Inc gauge, driven by footwear, sporting goods, health and beauty. Clothing, home and beauty showed the biggest discounts.
Online sales for the days leading up to Cyber Monday, today, could give companies an early sense of holiday-season performance as they await slower brick-and-mortar data. Yet initial forecasts for this month and next month point to dismal sales growth.
In the US, Salesforce predicted online sales would grow 1 percent during that period compared to last year, the slowest pace in at least five years. Adobe expects revenue to grow 4.8 percent, far behind the pre-pandemic average annual rate of 13 percent. The two companies analyze different transactions, which accounts for the variation in numbers.
Canada-based e-commerce marketplace Shopify Inc said global Black Friday sales rose 22 percent annually, led by clothing, personal care and jewelry.
TECH BOOST: New TSMC wafer fabs in Arizona are to dramatically improve US advanced chip production, a report by market research firm TrendForce said With Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) pouring large funds into Arizona, the US is expected to see an improvement in its status to become the second-largest maker of advanced semiconductors in 2027, Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report last week. TrendForce estimates the US would account for a 21 percent share in the global advanced integrated circuit (IC) production market by 2027, sharply up from the current 9 percent, as TSMC is investing US$65 billion to build three wafer fabs in Arizona, the report said. TrendForce defined the advanced chipmaking processes as the 7-nanometer process or more
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million. While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書). When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
RSS