Chinese shoppers spent $25 *billion* on Alibaba's Singles Day

Singles Day is like if Amazon Prime Day was a real national holiday. And this year, shoppers in China spent $25 billion in 24 hours.

The 8-year-old e-commerce holiday promoted by Alibaba—Amazon's biggest competitor and an e-commerce force in China—started as an anti-Valentine's Day encouraging single people to buy gifts for themselves every Nov. 11. Now, it comes with crazy deals and nationally televised concerts. This year, Nicole Kidman and Pharrell Williams made appearances.

Shoppers spent $25.3 billion, or 168.2 billion yuan, this year—a 40 percent jump from last year's $17.8 billion. That's 1.48 billion transactions, or 256,000 transactions per second at the day's peak.

"More than US$25 billion of GMV in one day is not just a sales figure," Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said in a statement. "It represents the aspiration for quality consumption of the Chinese consumer, and it reflects how merchants and consumers alike have now fully embraced the integration of online and offline retail."

For comparison, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S. only netted $6.79 billion in 2016. Amazon doesn't release sales figures for July's Prime Day, but it's pretty safe to assume the not-quite-national-holiday doesn't come close to $25 billion.