ALIBABA Group Holding Ltd.’s online shopping platforms Taobao and Tmall canceled their annual Dec. 12 shopping festival and will instead host another shopping spree called “year-end good price” in December, according to notices on the platforms’ websites Friday. The dates of the new festival were not included in the notice, which was posted in a help section for platform merchants. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the change. The 12.12 shopping festival, held annually Dec. 12 since 2012, was the less-celebrated sister of November’s “Singles’ Day” sales festival, which traditionally falls on Nov. 11 but has in recent years ballooned into a multi-week event beginning in late October. This year marked the second time Alibaba declined to release its sales results for the “Singles’ Day” festival period, but data provider Syntun estimated that cumulative gross merchandising volume (GMV) sales across major e-commerce platforms rose 2.08% to 1.14 trillion yuan (US$156.40 billion), compared with a growth of 2.9% last year. According to Alibaba, 80 million products were offered at their deepest discount of the year for “Singles’ Day.” Analysts saw Alibaba’s focus on discounts this year as an attempt to fight back against rivals such as Douyin and PDD Holdings’ Pinduoduo, that have changed the landscape of Chinese e-commerce in recent years by selling lower-cost and discounted items year-round. In another development, Alibaba is taking the first steps toward revamping its cloud business by overhauling its leadership, aiming to revive growth and ride an AI boom after canceling a much-anticipated spinoff of the US$11 billion unit. The company has appointed three new executives to head up major business lines within Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, with two reporting directly to chief executive officer Eddie Wu, Bloomberg quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying Friday. (SD-Agencies) | 