China's mid-year shopping festival highlights weak demand, rising role of AI

* Promotions began in mid-May and run through June 20 to June 21

* May retail sales fell 0.6% year-on-year

* This year's event may provide clues on popularity of AI shopping tools

By Casey Hall and Sophie Yu

SHANGHAI, June 18 (Reuters) - China's second-biggest shopping festival is drawing to a subdued close, underscoring weak consumer confidence and government pressure on e-commerce platforms to disengage from excessive discounting.

Marking the founding of e-commerce platform JD.com (JD) on June 18, the 618 mid-year shopping festival once showcased booming online shopping that in turn drove economic growth. It has evolved from a one-day event to a weeks-long stretch of discounted offerings from all major e-commerce platforms.

That's made consumer excitement hard to sustain, particularly as China continues to wrestle with a years-long property sector crisis and ever-simmering trade tensions with the U.S. that have helped undermine job security.

Yu Yang, an internet company engineer in Beijing, said she barely bought anything this year.

"I bought some laundry detergent, but not because it was discounted, it's just I ran out of it," she said.

A HEALTHY SHIFT AWAY FROM DISCOUNTING

This year's event on platforms such as JD.com (JD) and Alibaba's (BABA) Tmall began in mid-May and will run until June 20 or 21 - about 40 days long and three to four shopping days longer than last year, depending on the platform. Last year's 618 festival, which was about a week longer than the 2024 event, saw combined gross merchandise value, a business metric commonly used in e-commerce, climb 15% to 855.6 billion yuan ($127 billion), according to retail data provider Syntun. Daily spending amounts, however, fell.

This year, analysts expect overall revenue to rise by a single-digit percentage point due to the longer shopping period. Data for this year's event is expected next week.

As Chinese authorities seek to clamp down on cut-throat competitive practices, Alibaba (BABA) said this year's festival demonstrated a "decisive shift", with "brands prioritizing healthy margins over headline sales figures."

JD.com (JD), PDD and ByteDance-owned Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this year's 618 sales.

"This time around, we feel that it is quite quiet. I believe this is a good thing for the market. This shows that people's consumption patterns are normalised, people don't just stock up during shopping carnivals," said Derek Deng, Bain and Co's head of consumer products in Greater China.

Retail sales fell 0.6% year-on-year in May, the first decline since December 2022, when the world's second-largest economy was still under strict COVID-era restrictions.

Sharp drops in purchases of autos, home appliances, furniture, jewellery and building materials were evident in the data released on Tuesday, despite government subsidies to support big-ticket purchases.

The adoption of AI tools by e-commerce firms broadened in the first half of 2026, and analysts will be looking for clues as to how extensively consumers are using such tools. Alibaba (BABA) has, for example, integrated its AI model Qwen across the full product range on its Taobao platform, allowing consumers to browse, compare and purchase items via the Qwen app by chatting with the artificial intelligence agent, rather than manually navigating listings via e-commerce apps.

Jason Yu, general manager at CTR Market Research, said all the big e-commerce firms were using 618 to test their AI tools.

"So it's not just a battleground for e-commerce, but also more of a technology battleground for all these big platforms," he said.

($1 = 6.7616 Chinese yuan) (Reporting by Casey Hall in Shanghai and Sophie Yu in Beijing; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)